Back in July, we brought you word that Seaman developer Yutaka “Yoot" Saito and Digi Toys had plans to bring its simulation game The Tower for iPad to the US App Store after a Japanese release. Due in part to the language barrier, it’s been hard to keep tabs on the international project, but we’ve received new intel via Digi Toys’ official Twitter account that The Tower is slated to come “soon" to the US.
But how soon is soon? On Twitter, Digi Toys is refusing to pin down a date. Instead, it has said release is hinging on “Apple’s intention." There’s a couple of ways to interpret this, but we think this means that the title has been recently submitted to cert, so unless there’s a “Christmas miracle" as my brother-from-another-mother Eli said to me this afternoon, we probably won’t see The Tower until next year. (We’ve heard from many developers that Apple’s cut-off for pre-holiday approvals was over a week ago.)
But we’ll never see “The Tower" on the US App Store anyway. One big mention in the Digi Toys’ reveal of the game’s impending release is that it’s been renamed to “Yoot Tower." Your guess is as good as ours on this one, we’re thinking it might have to do with licensing, but we welcome flashier names.
You, me, the rest of us here, and perhaps your tech savvy grandmother are excited about this game for good reason. Yoot Tower is a simulation joint that plays like a vertical take on Sim City. In the game, you’ll play as a building manager with a mission to build a massive tower. This tower, however, won’t just be filled with bricks, iron, and cement. No, it’ll also house people — residents and workers and the like — who all have individual stress levels and needs. Negotiating these needs, while continuing to build your tower and placing desire facilities, composes the core of a game. So, like a good sim, Yoot Tower appears to have quite the interesting juggling act between you and outside forces.
Here’s a video, released long ago, featuring the game in action. You’ll see the similarities between Yoot Tower for iPad and Saito’s first major release SimTower for the Macintosh and PC.
We’ll continue, obviously, our watch on Yoot Tower’s progress and will fill you in on anything we possibly can. You’ll have to excuse the ticky-tacky nature of this post, but this is an exciting game, for sure, that also presents an interesting challenge on the coverage side of things.
