Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory

In 2022 I decided to only play hack and slash games, in whatever order i saw fit to connect any threads I wanted to explore. This is one of the games I played during The Year of the Hack and Slash! I’m porting over this post which originally appeared as a thread on twitter in 2022.

The next game in my Year of the Hack ‘N’ Slash is a PSP game called Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory! And it’s pretty weird! I mean just watch this clip from the intro cutscene - it has everything I love in a games story, depressed robots, androids questioning existence and guns protruding out of robot skulls!

The gist of the game is this - You are are an android named A.D.A.M. and for some reason you’ve decided you aren’t like other robots, and therefore you must climb this tower, reluctantly killing other robots while questioning all of your motives.

You have 5 loadout slots, Head, L/R arm, Chest and Legs. You mix and match weapons/armor to create a custom build that suits your liking. Blade weapon with support guns, all guns, etc. You pick up skin elixer to increase your stats, slots, etc. You get weapons and elixir as drops from enemies. One of the unique features is called the Overkill - when you deplete an enemies health, it starts counting up the damage you do afterwards. The more damage, the better the drop rate becomes.

You also grind up extra weapons you don’t want into elixir. This is where the risk/reward comes into play. When you die you lose all of your equipped items (never to be recovered) and get sent back to the 1st floor. Anything left in inventory can be equipped at the next terminal.

Buttt… you can also cheese it when you die and just restart the game from your last save point. This saves some considerable slog. Now to get back to climbing that tower! We’ve got to save the soul of this robot android.

I got to the top of the tower - YAY! A random voice told me to git gud and come back later - BOO! I’m back on the first floor, all maps of the random levels reset, gear/progress intact. wondering if this will turn into a “all bosses before last boss” thing. Spoiler, it didn’t. Its more of the same over and over again.

That’s a wrap on Rengoku! I finished my final assault on the tower. This game took about 10 hours to roll credits. While it was fun, it never showed you anything new after you got used to core gameplay loop. Bosses were the same as regular enemies, just with pumped up stats.

The best part about this game, was the ending was you leaving the tower, then sprouting a giant pair of fucking wings and flying your free ass into the sunset. It was like the fantasy ending of Brazil but without the rug being pulled out from underneath the protagonist.

Thoughts from 2025

I ported this writeup over from my twitter archive tonight because I saw someone post the cover on bluesky and the replies were genuine surprise. It doesn’t seem as though this game is that popular, which I supposed isn’t that much of a surprise. I’ve posted about it before because that intro video is just so sick, literally like nothing else out there. The sequel was pretty convoluted when I tried it and I’m wondering if more people had tried to play that, thus the originality of the first is getting left behind.

I would be as bold as to call this the El Shaddai of the PSP. What do I mean by that? It’s a unique game, that looks and plays like nothing else with writing that sits on the cerebral level. It shares a lot of themes with NieR: Automata, one of my favorite games, so anyone looking for a bite-sized romp through a tower of sad robots that you can kill more than 100% than give this a shot.