Tangledeep

The pitch: a roguelike that looks and plays like a lost SNES RPG

Tangledeep is a turn-based, procedurally generated dungeon crawler built openly in the tradition of Rogue, NetHack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but wrapped in detailed 16-bit sprite art and a JRPG-style job system instead of ASCII grids and command lists. Impact Gameworks put it into Steam Early Access on 18-19 July 2017 and shipped its full 1.0 on 1 February 2018 — the date that shows on the store page today is that 1.0 exit, not the original launch. Roughly seven and a half years later it still sits at a Very Positive rating across about 1,070 Steam reviews (around 82.5% positive), which is a genuinely durable reputation for a small indie roguelike.

That reputation starts with presentation, and it's the one thing almost nobody in the review page disputes. Reviewers from launch week through 2025 alike reach for words like "immaculate," "gorgeous" and "a masterpiece" to describe its sprite work and music — strong enough praise that the soundtrack shipped as two separate paid DLC releases in its own right. Just as importantly for a genre notorious for gatekeeping newcomers with obscure keybinds, Tangledeep plays cleanly with a controller and offers a non-permadeath toggle alongside the traditional one, which several longtime roguelike players specifically credit with getting them into a format they'd previously bounced off entirely.

"Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" — and the achievement data backs it up

The single most-repeated criticism in Tangledeep's review page isn't really about difficulty on its own; it's about whether the game's elaborate gear, stat and job systems actually produce meaningful choices. Reviewers land on almost identical phrasing years apart — "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle," "systems bloat," "gear has a ton of stats and modifiers, but none of them feel compelling" — arguing that the sheer volume of numbers on a weapon's tooltip rarely translates into builds that play noticeably differently from each other.

Steam's own public achievement percentages give that argument some hard numbers to stand on, specifically about the difficulty half of the complaint. Killing ten local champions, a relatively early milestone, sits at just under 50% of all owners. Beating the game's first boss sits at 39.8%. Beating the second sits at 19.6%. Character level 10 — not a late-game target in most roguelikes — sits under 20% as well. That's not proof the shallow-systems argument is correct, but it is consistent with a game whose difficulty curve loses a large share of its audience well before the job system has room to differentiate itself, which is exactly the shape of complaint reviewers keep making about RNG-driven enemy abilities capable of one-shotting a character with little available counterplay.

The bug that keeps coming back: items and pets disappearing

More concerning than the depth argument is a specific, independently repeated bug report: equipped weapons or tamed pets silently vanishing, most often described around a New Game+ transition. It shows up in a 2018-era review, again in 2020, again in 2022 ("bricked my most played save and lost my best pet"), again in 2024 ("there's a bug that deletes your weapons randomly that you spend a lot of time leveling up... that never got fixed"), and again in a 2024 review describing "all your [tamed monsters] being deleted by a glitch" with a developer response reportedly amounting to "yeah, that happens sometimes." For a roguelike, where a run's equipment and companions represent real invested time, a data-loss bug surfacing across a six-year span of independent reports is a more serious black mark than the depth-of-systems debate — it's the kind of complaint that erodes trust in the genre's core promise (that what you build during a run is actually yours to keep or lose fairly) regardless of how good the presentation around it looks.

DLC and the fair side of the ledger

Against those two problems, it's worth crediting what Tangledeep does not do. The DLC model is genuinely modest by current standards: two paid content expansions (Legend of Shara, Dawn of Dragons) and two soundtrack releases, no currency, no cosmetic shop, nothing resembling a live-service structure bolted onto what is otherwise a straightforward single-player purchase at NZ$17.99. Several reviewers explicitly push back against the negative-review consensus, arguing that what critics call shallow is simply roguelike difficulty being mistaken for bad design — a genuinely live argument in the review page rather than a one-sided pile-on, and worth taking at face value given how many of the people making it are self-identified veterans of harder, more traditional entries in the genre.

Verdict

Tangledeep earns its Very Positive rating honestly on presentation and accessibility — it remains one of the more inviting doors into turn-based roguelikes years after launch, and its soundtrack and sprite work hold up against far newer competition. But the review page's two real, well-evidenced complaints deserve equal weight: achievement data confirms a difficulty curve that loses most of its audience early, in a way that lines up with recurring "shallow once you look past the stat sheet" criticism, and a save-corrupting item/pet-loss bug keeps resurfacing across years of independent reports without a confirmed fix. Go in for the atmosphere and the accessible controls, not for deep build variety, and keep a backup save if New Game+ is where you're headed.

None of this erases what Tangledeep gets right. A game that regularly draws players away from harsher, keyboard-only roguelikes and gets them to finish a run at all is doing real design work, even if that same design leaves veterans of the genre wanting sharper teeth underneath the charm. Seven-plus years on, with its DLC catalogue small and its base price unchanged, it's a fair purchase for what it actually is — just don't buy it expecting the build-crafting depth its inventory screen implies.