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A wide blue column of electrical energy shimmers and spirals upwards from the centre of the stratospheric tower in which Teslagrad is set. The building is a forsaken asset left over from some recent European conflict, which is only just drawing to a weary close. The column of energy acts as a both a physical spine - a kind of elevator shaft that leads off towards the tower's labyrinthine network of rooms - and a thematic one: this is a game built around the concepts of magnetism and electricity.Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineer from whose life and work the game borrows its name and ideas, once built a tower in New York, but this is a different sort of place, more like an electrified castle filled with Castlevania-esque nooks and cellars. The tower rises spectacularly, the centrepiece of an unspecified European capital, which now burns around its foundations in war's ugly afterglow.
Teslagrad is anything but ugly, however. Its expressive hand-drawn art is at times reminiscent of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, but there's a Scandinavian flourish that adds melancholy to the folksy charm. Crackling bolts of blue electricity and red, sinister droning magnetic fields offset the browns and yellows of the tower's bricks. Creeping bugs, cloying shadow figures and bipedal robot giants patrol its floors, a curiously diverse gallery of squatters in a place whose original function is never made obvious.
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