There is a very old story. A princess in a tower. A wizard who put her there. The story usually ends with someone coming to save her.
This one doesn't start there. This one asks: what happens if nobody comes?
The Story
The wizard is absent-minded. Genuinely oblivious — he built a prison for a princess, then left on business and forgot she was there. Her cell happens to have a shelf of his arcane textbooks in it, because he never properly cleaned the room before converting it.
She reads one. Then another. Then she starts making notes in the margins.
The emotional arc of Tomes, Towers & Transmutation is: Helplessness → Curiosity → Competence → Unstoppable. That arc is the whole game. By the end, she is not the thing waiting to be found. She is the thing other people are afraid of.
An RPG First
At its heart this is an RPG. The story comes first. She begins with nothing — no spells, no allies, no resources — and every piece of power she accumulates is earned through the narrative. There are no abstract skill trees. Magic is learned by reading books. You find the book, you read the book, you have the spell. The captor's own footnotes in the margins occasionally unlock passive upgrades: pompous little reminders to himself that become her advantages.
"Note to self: ward expires after 1.5 seconds." — now she knows that too.
The progression isn't "grind until the number is big enough." It's "explore until you find the next thing to understand."
The Tower as Dungeon
The tower is seven floors plus a basement, and clearing each one is the spine of the game — which is where the tower-defence logic lives. Floors are procedurally generated around their theme. You clear a floor of enemies, and it becomes permanently yours: your safe space, your territory.
The basement — The Alchemical Workshop — is where it gets interesting.
Brewing and Alchemy
The wizard's real work was alchemical. The workshop in the basement is volatile, experimental, full of half-finished distillations and one unexplained stain on the floor. She inherits it.
Pot-making in this game goes deeper than slotting ingredients together. The system is grounded in the actual logic of the wizard's work — the same foundational principles the books in the library describe. Understanding alchemy isn't just useful for combat consumables; it's how you engage with the world's internal logic. Floor 2 is The Brewing Chamber — industrial scale, a central cauldron enormous enough that something important happened inside it. Mass production of anything requires really understanding the process that produces it.
The magic system and the alchemy system aren't separate things. They're two expressions of the same underlying principles the princess is learning from the same bookshelf.
The Monster Army
Enemies at low health can be spared. Spare them, and they join you.
This is an RPG mechanic more than a strategy one — it's about relationship and choice. The minions that settle in The Menagerie on floor 4 (the Wizard's old "associates" wing — they always called him "the tall nervous one") have their own comfort and morale. The army she builds is a consequence of how she's been moving through the world.
The Payoff
The power curve is intentionally exponential. The game knows it's building toward a comedy ending. By the time she reaches the Wizard — who is exactly as pathetic as the margin notes suggested — the joke is that she is now objectively more dangerous than anything the story originally set up as a threat.
The final boss is a narrative punchline. But the road there is a real RPG.
More as the overworld and monster systems come together.