The few known copies of The Illuminated Tower — assuming, of course, they are legitimate — are said to have been found in a variety of consumer electronic stores across Europe, Oceania, and the Americas. One such copy, shared in a thread for obscure software on a modest imageboard, still sported a sticker from a defunct computer electronics chain. But given the scarcity of those cerulean jewel cases, and the lack of any concrete evidence that they were ever widely distributed, it’s assumed that the vast majority of those who have played and now discuss the game did so through a downloaded copy, likely one uploaded anonymously to the aforementioned imageboard, which has since become the hub for all things Illuminated.
While little is known regarding the development of The Illuminated Tower, taking in account its low-polygonal graphics and its skeletal, almost naive approach to first-person adventure gaming (not to mention an exclusivity to antiquated Windows operating systems), it is generally agreed that the game was developed in the mid-1990s, when the novelty of 3D exploration still constituted a draw in and of itself. According to the opening titles, the game was developed by SideReal Systems (stylized as a black ‘SRS’ hovering in a blue circle), although no information on the studio has ever been found. Popular lore has placed SRS somewhere in Japan due to the title’s affinity with certain trends in the more self-consciously artistic Japanese adventure games distributed by Artdink or Synergy Inc, but this deduction has been colored in no small part by the imageboard’s overwhelming tendency towards Japanophilia. It’s true there has been evidence suggesting SRS operated out of the Minato special ward, but much of it is circumstantial, and equally plausible leads have led amateur sleuths to Florence, Krakow, and a garage in southwestern Chicago.
Immediately upon starting the game, players find themselves thrust into an angular pastoral scene painted in pointillist textures. The uneven green field is marked with two-dimensional outcroppings of wild grass and tufts of bright pixelated flowers. The sky is a vaulted blue dome, ringed darkly as it descends, painted with a scattered armada of fluffy clouds. Just two notches west of directly overhead shines the sun, an eight-pronged skylight which, when observed directly, subtracts everything from the screen, suspending the player’s artificial eye in a depthless plane of white. The clouds never move in this endless noon. An all-pervasive silence is occasionally disrupted by the invisible rustling of wind and trees and the chirpings of MIDI birdsong.
Despite the scale suggested by the nearsighted rendering — a system which shrouds anything more than thirty yards away in a veil of lilac mist — the field is quite small. But where the game lacks in scale it makes up for in detail, as a variety of ornaments have been carefully placed throughout the field. Emerging from the mist, monuments rise like islands from a grassy sea: the placid birdbath, the wishing well with its slanted tile roof, the many-legged stone lantern flickering a funnel of blue flame, the trio of distant corinthian columns lashed in ivy rope, the modest statuary fountain of a cherubic girl plucked straight from an English walled garden, the angular scholar’s stone textured with conspicuously square holes, the chipped marble effigy to what might be Minerva, the four croppings of bright and exotic flowers arranged as glyphs at the four compass points (clockwise from the north: a moon, a hexagram, an ankh, and a bulls-eye target respectively), and two neighboring trees, the larger of which proudly displays an autumnal plume of red, orange, purple, and gold, while the other is frail and bent, naked branches weighted by a minor orchestra of windchimes. But all adventures to the outer reach end at the same edge, a metaphysical barrier thinly disguised as an unbroken ringlet of two-dimensional trees. The compressed texture derived from some digital photograph is repeatedly pasted along its surface like sylvan wallpaper.
In this enclosure of strange subjects, one stands more prominent than the rest. Visible from even the farthest distance, the violet silhouette of a tower stands upright in the luminous lilac mist. Upon approach, the tower gains definition, a cylinder capped with a broad spire, wide-brimmed and sharply peaked like a wizard’s cap. The tower is textured to appear as if it was built from large, vine-choked cobblestones, while the spire is red and finely shingled.
When approached from the game’s starting location (near the southernmost tip of the field) players find themselves before the tower’s entrance, an arch with a raised portcullis, tips protruding like black fangs. Inside is a wooden landing, a dim brazier, and the opening of a staircase, curved, enclosed, flush with the tower’s wall. Heavy footfalls echo up and down the spiraling stairwell.
The stairs open into the tower’s garret, the living quarters reconfigured into some philosopher’s chamber. Ornate shelves and sideboards sag under the weight of colorful hardbacks and collected esoterica, the walls are marked with mounted instruments and framed pixelated recreations of works by the great metaphysical painters, a glass case holds among its treasures granite busts of what some believe are Alhazen, Poe, and Brahe. Up in the ceiling’s peak, streaming tendrils of incense intermingle with a crystal chandelier and poetic mobiles of the visible universe while their sticks, never to deplete, burn besides the gramophone which plays a compressed loop of Barber’s Adagio for Strings forever.
At the end of the room is a desk and beyond it, a window. The desk is incongruously well-manicured, holding on its wooden surface only a compass, an hourglass, a stack of leather-bound folios, a carved cup full of pens, a glass pyramid of an inkwell, and a sheet of paper. The paper is blank. The desk, with its velvet-cushioned chair, faces out towards the large bay window.
Although the game world’s geometry should by no means allow it, and there is no feasible way the player could reach it, the bay window affords a view of the verdant world beyond the field. The forest runs in emerald waves across hillocks and into gorges, a swarm of what must be individually modeled trees rising up like quills. Peaking out among the thicket are wisping chimneys and gothic spires, and in clearings the forms of unusual biomorphic structures. This thriving wilderness is cleft by a wide and winding river, an amethyst serpent slithering up to the distant horizon, occasionally climbing to a roaring waterfall or braced by red bow-shaped bridges. At the peak of a particularly bulbous hill, a miniature fairy tale castle extends a bouquet of blue-roofed turrets to the sky, while in the distant horizon, amethyst silhouettes of snow-capped mountains stand like the ridges of a lizard’s spines.
This view could theoretically extend forever. The lilac fog is nowhere to be seen.
Beyond this exploration, The Illuminated Tower has no other gameplay. Less of a traditional adventure game, it has been likened to something more along the lines of a work of digital land art, a lovingly sculpted non-corporeal space in which the player may explore. While today there is no shortage of these so-called ‘walking simulators’ on the market, to the devoted there is simply no match for The Illuminated Tower’s atmosphere, one which a fan has dubbed an “arcadian melancholy”, a mix of wistful yearning and adventurous expectancy. The circular field has been thoroughly charted, analyzed, and dissected, its monuments logged and its layout memorized. Clearly navigable, it can be recalled like any other location, and often when away from the game players report idly mapping its landscape onto the contours of their minds, mentrally traversing the open field and mysterious tower with a radiant clarity usually reserved for one’s childhood home.
So thoroughly embedded is the game in the subconscious of certain imageboard users that some have reported experiencing vivid dreams set in the world of the computer software. They write of “tower dreams”, nocturnal visits wherein the dreaming mind fills in the gaps left by polygonal suggestion. They find the tower’s stones are rough and weathered, rust clings like plaque to the tips of the looming portcullis, and the landing’s burning sconce casts the dreamer’s own shadow against the stairs. Some posts have even reported that, upon reaching the garret apartment, they’ve been able to smell the earthen scent of the burning incense, hear the popping of the smallest imperfections in the Barber record, and feel the subtle afternoon heat coursing in through the open window.
It is this personal identification, combined with the natural enigmas posed by many of the monuments (not to mention the confluence of extra-textual signposts in the scholar’s apartment) that has led the community to believe there is more to The Illuminated Tower than its limited gameplay suggests. Yes, they concede, it’s true that The Illuminated Tower has no mechanical puzzles in the tradition of Myst or its progeny, but that’s because the game itself is a puzzle, and surely one with great rewards. This is why, if you are to visit this modest imageboard you will find no shortage of communities sectioned off into their own threads: those theorizing as to the central tower serving as the dais of some enormous sundial, the amateur floriographers charting the four flower-glyphs into a rhizomatic cipher, and the fanatics adamant that the dark marks found in the trunks of the neighboring trees are not incidental details but a pixelated approximation of tortured Sanskrit.
Naturally, all of these assertions have generated no small amount of controversy, and every claim is subject to great scrutiny. Threads mostly consist of anonymous users engaged in bitter arguments as to the validity of their interpretations, and these tend to generate their own breakaway schools of increasingly esoteric study. But of all of these groups and all their theorizing, no rumor is as outre or as controversial as that of the few who claim to have accessed a second version of the game. Some of these reports are hazy (and have been commonly dismissed as mere tower dreams) while others are quite lucid; all of them tell of booting up the game to find the world in a moonless night, the sky alight with grains of twinkling stars. Under the night sky, the field is exactly the same, but the tower has taken on a frightful aspect, as if starlight has revealed in its silhouette a clear predatory character. Ultimately, the players are drawn to the sinister tower, and when they gaze beyond the window of the scholar’s apartment they find the stars above the darkened landscape rendered vividly. The lucid reports attest to the astronomical accuracy of the skies and of certain constellations, although more than one person has claimed said constellations have been perverted and possess a deranged, monstrous quality. But many more claim to have seen only black, the canvas of an unmade universe.
Perry Ruhland is a writer based in Chicago. His writing has previously been published in Baffling Magazine, Vastarien Magazine, and ergot.press. Website: perryruhland.com
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