[REVIEW] Unholy Heights

 

I like it when games surprise me. I like it when games push boundaries and do something unexpected, something kind of experimental. I like weird genre mashups that I didn’t see coming.

And I like Unholy Heights, which is the only game I know of that I can describe as “half tower defense, half landlord simulator in which you play as the actual devil.”

 
Unholy Heights is one of those games that’s easy to overlook, and you may never have heard of it before now. It was made by a tiny 4-person team called Petit Depotto, a game dev group that I can find no online presence for, and published by Playism across multiple platforms. The version I played was on PC, so I can’t speak to the experience on other systems, but for my part, what I played was glitch-free and lots of fun.

The premise of the game is that you’re the devil, and for whatever reason, you’ve decided to purchase an apartment building where monsters can come and live in peace. But that peace is only theoretical, because unsurprisingly, humans don’t take kindly to monsters living nearby, and they’ll frequently come to cause trouble. Your monstrous residents, who can range from overgrown chickens to people with schools of fish for heads to centaurs and many others, must defend their homes to that the devil isn’t killed or robbed.

At its core it’s a tower defense game with a gimmick, but honestly, it’s the gimmick that makes the game. Unholy Heights isn’t just played by sending out your tenants to fight for you and that’s it. There’s also an apartment manager/landlord aspect to the game too. Your residents want to be happy in their homes, so providing them with amenities is key to that happiness. Tenants will want different things, and it’s your job to provide. In return, they get happier, and higher happiness means you can increase their rent without them complaining. More money means you can upgrade the building, add more floors and rooms so you can attract more tenants, who will in turn fight for you to keep you and your building safe.

The tower defense aspect is important, but quite frankly, it’s the apartment management that provides the bulk of the game’s fun. Engaging in fights involves nothing more than clicking on doors to call your tenants out, and watching their health so you know when to make them retreat (they will otherwise fight until they die). Keeping tenants happy and watching their weird lives unfold? That’s where the game’s draw lies.

APARTMENT DRAMA

 
Tenants will move into apartments on their own, but sometimes they’ll find lovers who will move in with them. Sometimes tenants of the same species and living in different apartments will hook up and move in together, freeing up an apartment for an additional tenant. Couples can have babies, who will grow up. All of these extra tenants can be part of your fighting army, extra bodies to add their strength to the battle against encroaching humans.

Monsters will want different things in their apartments. Floweries will want tree-patterned wallpaper and vegetable gardens more than they’ll want exercise equipment, for instance. Studeepies like computers and bookshelves. I mentioned briefly before that the more you buy them what they want for their apartments, the happier they’ll become, and the higher you can thus raise their rent. Rent isn’t fixed through the whole building, but varies from apartment to apartment, and by who’s living there. If you decorate an apartment to a tenant’s specifications and then they move out or die and someone else moves in, that new tenant might not be so happy with the arrangements, causing you to redecorate and lower the rent for a while as you make them happy.

Rent is charged every day, and monsters can and will miss payments. Sometimes it’s because they’re unemployed — yes, monsters have jobs, get promotions, get fired, and all of that affects how much they can pay. Sometimes they just… don’t pay, for some reason. Family emergency sucked up their savings, I guess; I’ve had tenants paying just fine for weeks, and then suddenly they can only pay half their rent one day, but catch up again almost as quickly.

The happiness of monsters can also be affected by other tenants, or rather, the species of other tenants. Demons, for instance, hate demi-humans, and vice versa. If you have both as tenants, they will stay unhappy for a very long time. Possibly permanently, assuming you can get them to stick around long enough. If they’re unhappy enough, they will move out. In my last game, I could not get demons to stick around for very long, because I had a demi-human tenant who wasn’t happy about the demons, but at least seemed to have a more laissez-faire attitude about them. But the demons would move in, get unhappy, get angry, and then leave.

 
This is why the landlord-simulator aspect of the game is what can keep me playing long after I get bored of the tower defense aspect. You need to play the tower defense part no matter what, as random humans will always come by and try to attack you even if you’re ignoring the rest of the world, and beating certain quests is what allows you to upgrade the building, but honestly, you could remove that aspect of Unholy Heights and I would still likely play it for hours, just watching my tenants go about their drama-filled lives.

LET’S GO ON A QUEST

The game has quests to complete, as I mentioned, and those quests unlock a lot of content along the way. Quests are always about defeating waves of enemies, and will always give you bonus money when you complete them (which is a great way to get cash if you’re trying to challenge yourself and give your monsters a rent-free building to live in), but many of them will give you access to new monsters or new decorations and furniture. Certain quests must be completed in order to upgrade the apartment building, so it’s not just a matter of having enough money on hand to pay the construction crew.

This is another reason to keep your tenant happy: many of them get stronger when they’re happy, which enables them to take on tougher enemies. There’s a limit to their strength, of course, and progressing in the game will unlock stronger tenants that can live in your devilish apartment complex, but the quests do get harder as you go, and tenants can die, so it’s important to make them as strong as you can.

Unholy Heights turned out to be a surprisingly fun game that I played for hours at a time. There are plenty of tower defense games on the market, to be sure, but I’ve found a lot of them get pretty dull after a while because aside from different themes and graphics, most of them are pretty much the same. Unholy Heights adds a new aspect to the mix, and even though it isn’t remotely a new game (it was released in August 2013), it still remains playable and fun even now, nearly 6 years later. If you enjoy casual games that gross genre boundaries, or if you’re a fan of tower defense or simulation games and are looking for something with a different flavour, then absolutely give this one a try.