Tangledeep

Authors: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Dated: 2021-03-29

I picked this game up on sale at GOG after being e-mailed a special discount code. The game was already on sale, so the code just saves you a little something extra, like a dollar or something. There were several games on sale that I was considering, but I told myself that the last thing I need ism ore games, even if they are nice-looking Linux games.

At first I didn't feel like the game would appeal that much to me, but I took the time to watch some reviews and learn about it beforehand. What you can understand easily is that it's very squarely in the Rogue genre. I don't just mean that it's Rogue-"like", since I've been hearing that genre is being stretched out fairly loosely. Tangledeep is fairly classical in that genre, so I don't really have to describe much about the gameplay or basic premise.

So I thought, well why pay money for this when there are so many good free games in the genre? Even the graphics don't look that much better than your typical tiles. One thing that convinced me to go for it (besides the sale price), were the overwhelmingly positive reviews and some particular praised heaped on its soundtrack. Who doesn't like a game with nice music? They also said it appeals to the nostalgia of 16-bit console games, so I guess it's meant to take you back to the SNES days.

Now having spent a couple hours playing it, I can say it was well worth the price. First of all, it's obvious that a lot went into this game. The graphics are actually nice, but one problem is that the game ought to have vsync because of all the 2D scrolling, but there's no obvious way to enable that on Linux. I'm sure there's some config file editing or launch option that can turn that on, but I just learned to live without it. Not a big deal. Since it's turn-based, the important action like the combat is not going to feature a whole lot of scrolling.

Basically, it's a fun game with enough creative perks in it to make you enjoy it apart from the others in its genre. You can either play it as a hardcore Rogue, where you die and that's the end of the game for real, or you can opt for a kind of light, maybe sort of JRPG experience where you can die but still carry on. When you venture into the dungeon, you seemingly have the ability to teleport back to base any time you want, so I assume you can avoid death by taking your time and fighting in lower levels so you can heal up and get stronger before venturing forward. That being said, the combat gets brutal fast, so it seems a constant part of the game is figuring out how to deal with low health and the lack of healing items, which you'll use a lot of.

As for the soundtrack, it does stand out quite a bit, yes. It makes the game more fun to play, definitely. The soundtrack in particular has a very clear imitation of the scores of games like Chrono Trigger and maybe Final Fantasy VI, so they are doing alright with the nostaliga trip. The game itself doesn't seem to totally rip off either in its graphical style, but I would say they are probably going for something like Chrono Trigger.

The game also features some side-things that I ignored at first but probably shouldn't have, namely the cooking mechanic and monster taming. I actually don't want to bother with learning how to cook, but I came to realize that food is a lot of what you end up dealing with in the game, and knowing how to cook well seems like it's going to have an impact on your survival. Having an monster companion to fight with you will probably also help you survive. This reminds me a bit of Nethack, which I used to play a lot of back in the day. I can't say the pet in Nethack was really that helpful, but one constant problems in that game was figuring out how not to starve. You won't starve in Tangledeep, but you'll need the HP in particular and the buffs.

Some of the reviews I saw said that this game is a prime quality implementation of the classic genre. I would say that's about right. It's not a new type of game at all, but well worth having. So was it worth it? Yes, I'd say it's one of the better purchases I've made recently. I will probably play it even more than I played Dead Cells, which I didn't actually play that much in spite of how much people loved it. I think I'm just not a 2D platformer person.

If you'd like a nice looking graphical Rogue-like that's free and open source, I'd suggest checking out Pixel Dungeon if you haven't already. (You probably have.) I played plenty of that on my Android phone years ago, and was surprised to even find it for Linux on Flathub later.