The Strange Tower is a narrative adventure world presented in an interactive fiction format. You navigate the Tower by clicking on the gems below each entry. As you explore, you'll find a digital garden full of stories, puzzle, poems, art and secrets. You're invited to wander through it at your own pace, whenever you'd like a break from the rest of the internet.
The tower explores a wide range of themes, usually in a fantasy or sci-fi presentation. The tower has sections exploring art, ludology, technology, philosophy and more. Certain sections may be better enjoyed by wiser minds. It's recommended that visitors are old enough to handle big ideas and the occasional bad word
Content Promises
The second-person, choice-based format requires some trust between us, so I promise three things:
1. There is no sexually charged content in the tower. Romance is limited to narrative relationships between NPCs. I hope you love my characters, but I don't want you in love with any of them.
2. There are no plots about war or graphic violence. Some stories may involve fictional danger, like a rolling boulder trap or an exploding star, but never hate, like cruelty or malice.
3. There are no bad endings. In fact, there aren't really any endings for you, the character, at all. Every story arc within the tower ends with you fully able to continue exploring. You don't have to worry about picking the wrong choices, losing progress, or wasting time checking something out. Chasing your curiosity is the optimal strategy.
Explore Everything for Free
The tower is something I make for anyone who finds their way to it. You can explore all of the available content for free, without ever even giving me your contact info. (More about data privacy in a minute.) There are no distracting advertisements, no sneaky product referrals, no premium access subscriptions and no corporate sponsors. Instead, I use an "all-for-all" crowdfunding model. Every donation funds the development of more content for everyone.
Supporting the Strange Tower Project
The tower is always growing, I add to it whenever I have the inspiration and time between my other creativepursuits. Explore around the beginning and you'll find a the Anacenter, where you can keep track of changes to the tower, and also the current Expansion campaigns. Those are community-funded expansions that will unlock new content for all explorers. If you enjoy exploring the tower, and you're in a position to contribute to its growth, I hope you'll consider donating to an active expansion.
Data Privacy
Typically, I don't care about your data. By that, I mean that most of the time, I don't need to know anything about you for you to explore. That only changes in certain, clearly labeled situations, such as making a donation to an Expansion campaign, contributing to a group puzzle, or sending me feedback. In those cases, I collect only the data necessary for the interaction, and I don't sell that data to anyone.
No User Accounts
Your progress through the Tower is stored in your browser's LocalStorage, not on a remote server. If you clear your browsing data, or you use a different device or browser, the Tower will treat you as a new explorer, forgetting your previous visits. The tower does not have user accounts to log into. You can also reset all your progress with the button on the front page (click "Start Over" to return to the beginning).
Teleportation
If you bookmark a passage (or write down its URL slug), you can return to that passage at any time, this kind of teleportation is allowed, but there's a catch: Teleportation occasionally breaks the flow of certain puzzle sequences in the Tower. Any equipment or enchantments you have will follow you around, which means sometimes you can bring them to passages that aren't expecting them. Teleport at your own risk.
Your progress is saved as you move through the tower. You can see your recent passages below the gems. You can also see those on the front page of the site (strangetower.net), if you've forgotten where you left off.
You Can Only Cheat Yourself
Clever players may know of certain ways to manipulate their progress data, or expose secrets through technical means. While it's not the way I intend for the tower to be explored, I'm not going to try to stop you. Just like skipping ahead in a novel, the worst that will happen is you'll spoil part of the story for yourself. I do ask you to refrain from spoiling puzzle solutions and secrets for other players who aren't directly asking for those spoilers.
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P.S. None of the text or art in the tower is AI generated. Simply put, I have too much fun writing to let a robot do it for me. If you can read this sentence, there are 0 AI generated images currently in the tower. Future areas of the tower may explore themes of technology and automation, but any use of AI for content will be clearly labeled and entirely optional for progression. I have used AI for help with code syntax for some of the trickier Javascript functionality, but I don't implement any code I can't personally understand, test, and maintain.