Tower of Heaven is a platformer game released by Askiisoft Games in 2009. The game puts us in control of Eid, who strives to climb the eponymous Tower of Heaven in search of glory. As they climb, they receive a book of laws, arbitrary restrictions that limit your movement further and force you to look at each room in unique ways.
There are three relevant versions of the game for speedruns: the original GameMaker release, the Flash port version 1.01 and version 2.0. Of these versions, Flash v1.01 is the fastest thanks to an oversight near the end of the game that I’ll explain once I get there.
The run is reasonably straightforward, as the rules get announced one by one. Movement is fairly obvious aside from some techniques such as releasing the jump button the moment we leave a wind current in order to reduce our upward momentum when needed, and since we have no air acceleration, we can release the left/right direction for some frames when needed to avoid death.
The major skip of the run is almost right at the end. In level 11, the flashing blocks are implemented by swapping the block for a white one during two frames. Since the tile is swapped, it is not programmed as damaging, so we can stand on it during those two frames. As such, by performing a specific jump to get on top of the inverted L platform, we can land on it during one of those two frames and jump out, allowing us to skip half the autoscroller. As a note, since I landed on said L platform in the second available frame, I didn’t have enough ground time to jump off before dying, so I paused the game for a frame to bypass the input buffer and jump right away.
Special thanks to Mat511, author of the currently available Flash TAS, for help and reference with some of the harder tricks.
Info Teddy: I love Askiisoft's games. Pause Ahead when?
Info Teddy: Great job, you definitely followed all the rules. Accepting to Standard.
