PALACE OF WOE tells a story without directly telling you much at all as you explore a strange dungeon filled with fears, puzzles, and chairs.
Starting off as a character able to push around chairs and interact with monsters, you’re exploring this strange room. Pushing chairs together sometimes makes them disappear, but it seems they cannot be pushed if they are not on white tiles or by white tiles. Some chairs are a different color pallette, which means that they aren’t chairs at all. I’ve now spoken a lot about chairs, but PALACE OF WOE is a very surreal game and it does have a large amount of chairs. Running into the chairs that are different from the others will trigger a battle against some monsters – mainly in the past.
When you find yourself in a fight with a monster, you’ll see a grid area that you must fill. You’re given a collection of cubes in a line or spread out, and you need to place them down within the grid to fill up lines. Once these lines are filled, they will disappear, doing damage to the enemy. If at any point you place a tile on a tile that’s already placed, you will lose a life point and that tile will disappear, leaving the spot blank again. As you take on bigger and badder enemies (some of which are not chairs), the combination of squares you get to place becomes more complex, meaning you need to be careful of where you place them. There is a timer which will hurt you if it runs out before you place down your piece.
Monsters aren’t the only things lying around, as you can find chests and objects as long as you can reach them. There’s a lot of mystery and a lot to explore in PALACE OF WOE, but the first monster is always your past, which you need to defeat to move forward.
PALACE OF WOE is available now on Itch.io.