Sunset City - The Dark Tower

A black tower on the skyline with an entire city standing between you and it. That shape is as old as storytelling, and it has legs for a reason: you can see where you're going the whole time you're going there. No lore dump. No map screen. Just up, and toward.

"There's always a stealthy way to do it" is a real design claim, and one that's very easy to get wrong. It mostly holds. The vertical movement turns out more interesting than the sneaking does, and the whole thing is over quickly, but I'll take short and finished over long and vague every single time.

Stealth stands or falls on the read. Can you work out where a guard is looking before you commit to a ledge? That's the entire ask here, climbing plus sightlines, so the movement has to carry the lot. It does. I went in braced for a tech demo and came out planning real routes up the outsides of buildings.

Climbing, and keeping out of sightlines while you climb. It does mean it about there always being another way up. I got spotted over and over early on, then found a route round the back that felt like cheating and probably wasn't. You can tell this is a stack of techniques somebody had been saving for the right project