Tangledeep (2018)

• Playtime: 10.5 hours

• Played: 2025

• Expectation: Mildly positive. I don't care for roguelikes but this looked interesting on the store page.

Intro

Tangledeep is a roguelike in the most literal sense. It's a 2D turn-based dungeon crawling strategy role-playing game. The main twist is that you can capture enemies and make one at a time fight at your side as a pet.

Review

The problem with traditional roguelikes is that Dungeons of Dredmor exists. All the way back in 2011 it offered an insane amount of build variety, lots of unique elements, incredibly creative skills ("Killer Vegan") and tons of humour

Tangledeep isn't bad. You pick one of 12 basegame and 2 DLC classes and can switch between them for a fee, or optionally for free. Combined with a reasonable amount of item affixes and some other options, there is a fair amount of build variety.

The game has four different difficulty options, including an easy one without permadeath. You can also freely select from over a dozen optional modifers to make things easier, harder or just different.

On the negative side, it's just not as creative and funny as Dredmor. You can't be a hat-wearing, whip-wielding Archeologist who trades artifacts for XP using a skill called "It Belongs In A Museum!". The various classes have some twists on typical D&D classes, but they're still too similar.

And while Tangledeep is blessed with a text-based inventory without limits, the actual interface is clunky. There aren't enough filtering tabs, for instance different weapon types. You can't easily compare items, it just say "+/- X amount of damage/defense" and that's it. You can mark items as junk but not sell those with one click. The inventory is such an important part so this really stings.

I did have some fun with this but you have to really like roguelikes to get much out of Tangledeep.