Tangledeep Review – Rooted in Nostalgia

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Invoking the Past

It’s nothing new for video games to deploy nostalgic visual styles and soundtracks to lure players in. Too often, those games haven’t offered a whole lot beyond the nostalgia pandering; it’s nothing more than pretty aesthetics to hide uninspired gameplay mechanics, and breaks the MST3K rule of not constantly reminding your audience of something better. Moonlighter is a great example of this. It has some references to Zelda and a vaguely Zelda-like aesthetic, but the game itself is really nothing like Zelda — and had me wishing I was playing something that wasn’t utterly disappointing and tedious instead.

Tangledeep is the latest roguelike to hit Nintendo Switch, and this one is “inspired” by SNES-era classics like Secret of Mana — despite it being nothing like Secret of Mana, really. Unlike Moonlighter, and countless others, Tangledeep stands out by its own merits — with the nostalgic aesthetic simply being icing on the cake.

The roguelike genre is a pretty broad spectrum, and Tangledeep definitely falls toward the more “classic” end of that versus something like Dead Cells. The biggest convention of the roguelike genre is the permanent death of the player character — that’s present here, and for the real masochists out there, you can even pick a difficulty where you’ll lose all your progress in Tangledeep‘s small hub-world. There are more forgiving modes as well, including an “adventure” mode where the only penalty for death is the loss of gold and job points. I honestly can’t imagine playing too much of Tangledeep on one of the perma-death modes, but I’ll get into exactly why that is later.

Once you get started in Tangledeep you’ll get to pick from one of nine different jobs (which is just another word for “classes”), with an additional three to unlock. There’s a pretty wide variety of jobs to use, and you can even swap between them at any time back in the hub world. A couple stand-outs to me were the Sword Dancer, which uses powerful elemental sword strikes; the Budoka, which cripples enemies and sends them flying with punches and kicks; and the Floramancer, which calls upon the power of nature to tangle enemies. Tangledeep lets you unlock new skills for each of the jobs, but instead of doing so through leveling up (that only improves your base stats), you’ll gain new skills by spending job points.

Job points are accumulated by killing enemies — just like regular ‘ole EXP — but you can earn even more by completing “rumors.” In Tangledeep‘s small hub world, one character will offer what are essentially side-quests: things like killing a powerful monster on a specific floor, or dropping an item near a monster to see what happens, and so on. They seem to be randomly generated and they’re pretty repetitive, but they are a nice distraction from the main dungeon crawling from time to time. A lot of these rumors will award you with plenty of job points or special equipment. Also, job points don’t carry over from job to job, but switching back and forth doesn’t wipe out your job points, either — they’re always stored for you. The way that Tangledeep lets you mess around with the different jobs is one of the best parts about it.

Now, the jobs in Tangledeep wouldn’t even be worth talking about if the actual dungeon crawling wasn’t any good — and, thankfully, it’s pretty dang good. Players start off in a small hub world where they can buy and sell items and equipment, heal up, and so on. This is where you’ll first enter the tangledeep, which is a series of randomly generated areas with the occasional branching pathway and story-related boss encounter. To be honest, Tangledeep does feel meandering and pointless early on. You’re just going from floor to floor in a forest-themed area — and then you come up to the first story-related boss and his gang of bird-bandits (the bandits are birds, they don’t steal birds) and then Tangledeep suddenly feels like an adventure. You’re still going from randomly generated floor to randomly generated floor, from a forest theme to a cave theme to a castle theme, but it all feels like it’s leading to something. You aren’t just spinning your wheels for nothing like in City of Brass. This is why I prefer to play Tangledeep on adventure mode instead of the perma-death modes.

Being a more “classic” roguelike means that Tangledeep is turn-based without ever really appearing to be. While dungeon crawling, each action you make automatically expends one turn. After you complete a turn, every enemy on the floor (most of which you won’t be able to see) also make their turn. Moving, attacking, changing equipment — these all expend a turn. This lets you carefully plan out how to approach one or more enemies when you come across them, and you’ll need to think about it because the enemies in Tangledeep are not pushovers. The game is grid-based, so you’re able to plan a course of action to avoid an enemy’s area-of-field attack while setting up yours at the same time. And, sure, a lot of encounters will simply having you mash the A button to win, but Tangledeep really shines when you have to think outside the box a bit.

Dungeon crawling can get pretty lonely, but in Tangledeep, you’re able to capture most of the enemies you come across, tame them, and dungeon crawl with them. There’s a pretty wide variety of enemies in the game, including one that looks like a Venasaur from Pokemon. Capturing monsters requires getting them down to 15% HP or less and whacking them with a special item called a Monster Mallet, returning to the hub world, and dropping them off at a little monster ranch. Naturally, the monsters are miserable in their new conditions, so you’ll have to feed and groom them before they’re happy enough to set out with you. While the monster catching mechanic is pretty neat overall, this aspect is a bit tedious as I routinely dumped all of my restorative food items just to get a big snake to like me. Thankfully, there is a warping and fast-travel mechanic in Tangledeep, so returning to the hub world and then jumping back into the crawl is never tiresome.

You’ll pick up tons of loot across the various floors in Tangledeep, a lot of which is only useful to sell, but there will be the occasional weapon that has a cool name and does a lot of damage. Any weapon you pick up can be upgraded to become stronger, of course, although Tangledeep does it in a way that’s just a little bit tedious. You’ll have to find special orbs, and once you have those, you can set one to a weapon and then clear a special mini-dungeon to increase its power. Just like the main dungeon, if you’re on one of the perma-death modes and you die, you’ll lose all of your progress. YIIK: A Postmodern RPG does something similar with its “mind dungeon” but that served a broader narrative purpose that pays off in the end — in Tangledeep, it just seems like a way to pad in some extra difficulty.

System reviewed on: Nintendo Switch.

Disclaimer: A review code for Tangledeep was provided by the publisher.