The latest Magic Tower games

Magic Tower games are based on a particular blend of puzzle and strategy gameplay. They usually involve exploring a series of enemy-filled grid-based dungeon rooms, with stats and items carrying over between rooms. This is inspired from role-playing games, but it’s actually very different in that the items and enemies have fixed positions within the dungeon, and the outcome of each fight is entirely deterministic. This shapes the gameplay towards thoughtful resource management and complex route planning.

In practice, the rooms contain keys, potions and equipment upgrades to pick up, along with enemies that will set you back a specific amount of HP based on your equipment. Some of the fights can be avoided, but most enemies act as roadblocks to additional items or new rooms, and you’ll have to decide whether they’re worth spending your HP on. Apply this return-on-investment logic enough times, reload previous savefiles to backtrack on non-optimal decisions, and you should eventually reach the end of the dungeon.

The Magic Tower genre originates from Tower of the Sorcerer, a 1996 game from Japan which received slightly different titles after being translated for English-speaking countries and then for China. The game enjoyed significant popularity in China, where a large community of players has created countless dungeons based on the game's assets and mechanics. H5mota is a Chinese platform offering to play hundreds of user-created dungeons from any modern web browser; you could also browse WDmota to download hundreds more.

The games listed below are the most recently released Magic Tower games in the Thinky Games database.