How do teens in IT classes waste their time these days? When I was a young whippersnapper, when my teacher wasn’t looking I’d head to sites like Miniclip, Nitrome, wherever I could get my hands on some Flash games, to play all sorts of little oddities, particularly system heavy ones that were fun to mess around with for 10 minutes once in a while. Games like that feel rare now with the death of Flash, but I think Tower Lab, a physics roguelite tower defence deckbuilder where you attempt to blast enemies off a ledge into an infinite void to their demise, feels pretty close.
Tower Lab works thusly: there are two portals, one where variously coloured upright beans are emitted, another where they enter. You are presented with a selection of cards, all of which cost a certain amount of points, points which you are in limited supply of, that allow you to plant different bits of machinery to try and shove these enemy beans off a ledge.
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These machines come in a range of flavours. For example, one is quite simply a fan, turning on every so often to attempt to push the beans off. Some beans are too heavy, however, so you might place a shrink ray earlier along the tower so that they’re easier to blow off. A gif on the game’s Steam page shows how you can take this even further by shrinking them down, making them weightless, blowing them away, before making them even larger than before so that they fall to their deaths. Systems! They’re quite neat, and from what I can tell your technical know-how will be put to the test more and more over the course of the game’s various levels.
This is exactly the kind of game I would have loved messing about with as a distracted teen. IT class is a waste of time! But a game like Tower Lab isn’t. It’s quite satisfying in small doses, and levels don’t waste your time either. I quite like the foundations that have been laid here, and look forward to recreating scenes from my youth when it launches later this year. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam right here.