Magic tower

Magic Tower is a sub-genre of puzzle RPGs that involves using limited amounts of resources in the game to survive until the end. Battles are completely deterministic, involving only trading hits back and forth with the player's and monster's respective health, attack, and defense. Colored keys are often used to give the player options in a level, like spending a key to open a door rather than fighting a monster or having items gated by a key. Scoring checkpoints are often used to measure how well the player did based on the resources they took to the checkpoint. It is possible for the player to soft-lock and not be able to complete the game if they did not use their resources well enough, so saving and reloading are done often.

Tower of the Sorcerer [魔法の塔] is the first Magic Tower game, with the Japanese name literally being Magic Tower (魔法の塔). Originally a NEC PC-9800 Series and DOS game, a shorter version of the game was ported to Flash and translated to Chinese. The genre remains most popular in the Chinese-speaking world.