The post What’s the point of Sin Slayers‘ Tower of Trials, again? first appeared on Killa Penguin.

I don’t mean to pile on Sin Slayers any more than I already have, and there have been some positive improvements like existing boss immunities being communicated to the player and the addition of a merchant who can buy and sell items at the hub area, but the game’s new Tower of Trials gauntlet of fights seems at odds with its purpose. That’s hardly surprising when you consider Sin Slayers‘ sin mechanic that discourages you from engaging with events by ensuring that their rewards are paltry and result in enemies becoming damage sponges. Still, I had hoped that the game’s tendency to undermine its mechanics was an unfortunate mistake that could be remedied. Now it’s looking like an intentional design decision.

Sin Slayers‘ Tower of Trials is a series of fights that you can access from the map screen. The news post announcing it promises valuable rewards for beating its three different difficulty tiers, and in theory, this could be a brilliant way to smooth out the weird midgame difficulty spike that hits around the time you take on Sinlord Greed (mostly because of his endless minion spawning). Especially since the chance of finding good equipment in chests has been reduced alongside an apparent bump to the midgame-lategame difficulty.

The Tower of Trials isn’t a solution to any particular problem, though. In practice, it’s yet another self-defeating mechanic.

The issue here is that you can only fight enemies who you’ve encountered already in Sin Slayers‘ maps, and despite having completed Sin Slayers, I still haven’t encountered several enemy types. That means that I can’t finish any of the three Tower of Trials difficulties without going hunting for these enemies. Think about what that means: you’re effectively put in a situation where grinding becomes mandatory to maybe-possibly obtain equipment that makes combat feel slightly less grind-intensive. Between “sin” and this new mechanic, Sin Slayers is starting to look less like a game and more like a social experiment inspired by Catch-22. It’s to the game’s detriment.