Tangledeep

seen dr incompetent play it and been hooked since well worth the money good systems solid roguelike good variety of items and classes and dungeons

I wish I could just post a positive review with a few asterisks, but in the end, I don't really think Tangledeep meets its full potential, and that's honestly more devastating than any complaint about balancing or writing. Tangledeep is a game with some beautiful art, some good music, some good ideas, and a whole lot of unmemorable stuff in between. Lets start with the good: Tangledeep may not do anything unique, but it does most of the things it tries to do right, or at least according to formula. Loot drops are plentiful and full of mostly unusable (for your class) garbage but are still fun to pick through for the occasional treasure for about half the game's playtime, and there are regular side areas that mix up the crawl. Many side quests yield useful items or abilities, and you'll actually end up overpowered fairly quickly if you do them all, but that's kind of the standard for roguelikes anyways. The pet system works fine, even if the decision to make the pet's hidden favorite food one of the dozens available in the game is baffling, and generally the classes feel unique and have some good synergy with specific strategies. That being said, there's nothing in Tangledeep that sticks out to me as better than its predecessors in the genre, and all of the annoyances of Roguelikes have been imported without any unique mitigation. Picking through gear becomes a slog lategame as your available strategies are determined by RNG, upgrading weapons and armor involves grinding easy dungeons that sometimes have mandatory damaging floors which drain your limited healing items, and the whole game starts to feel very repetitive once it's clear there are no puzzles, no hidden interactions with certain skills in the environment, and generally nothing to discover other than the odd quirky merchant that's a reskin of one in your home base. The story, by the way, is atrocious. The protagonist makes "discoveries" that seem like huge leaps of logic from the player's side, and for all the game's starting monologue about knowledge being the true greatest treasure, the plot is generic and basically involves reading a backstory, fighting a character you heard did some stuff offscreen, and winning the game. This isn't unusual for roguelikes, but you can't start your game with a monologue about how exploration will yield valuable knowledge when the story is this bad and constantly undercut by jokes that aren't particularly witty. Some other petty gripes: 1. Consumable spamming, specifically for healing, is way too powerful and generally rewards the player for hoarding healing items for big fights rather than engage with risk management. 2. Most of the buffs elite enemies get don't affect how you fight them at all. I spent most of the game spamming a ranged attack and never really needed to do anything else outside of an elemental resistance or a boss fight. Par for the course, but unimpressive. 3. I beat the game without finding any unique armor or weapon sets for my class, which meant all my loot was randomly generated. Saving this for NG+ seems like a terrible decision to me because I was so uninvested in my build and character that I have no desire to even play NG+, so these special sets basically don't exist to me. 4. Permadeath seems like a good tribute to old roguelkes, but it's actually just a potentially huge time sink that leads the player to never push in further than they easily can for fear of being punished. I was never encouraged to take risks because the loot is all randomly generated anyways, so I have just as good a chance of getting a lightning buff ring on the easy floor as the "tricky" floor and much less chance of randomly dying. Why risk it when the loot's not better? 5. Enemies spawning in a cluster randomly are a mess to deal with even in easy areas and this makes the difficulty have huge spikes and valleys based on RNG. 6. Monsters are boring, generally just generic fantasy/sci-fi archetypes and never anything I was excited to have as a pet. 7. Characters are boring too! Most only have a few lines of dialogue and their sprite, and there's no real opportunity to get to know most of them better. I couldn't tell you one of their names after ten hours. That's bad. All of these are issues that the roguelike dungeon crawler genre has in general, none of them are fixed here. Some praise again: if you've never played a roguelike dungeon crawler, this is an amazing starting point as it's forgiving in many ways while also being tough enough to earn the title of roguelike. However, I would keep in mind that this does not represent the pinnacle of the genre as it exists right now, and the sequel had better have some really groundbreaking ideas if it's going to be worth playing.