Tanglewood

I want to talk about what it means to actually hand-craft a game, because Tanglewood makes the argument better than any think-piece could. Developer Matt Phillips spent five to six years writing this entirely in 68000 assembly language on original 1990s Sega development hardware, squeezed into a 4MB Mega Drive cartridge, with every background tile and animation frame drawn pixel by pixel, no automation, no shortcuts. The PC version on Steam is running that authentic ROM through emulation, and buying it gets you the actual Mega Drive BIN file so you can load it on a flash cart if you own the real hardware. That level of commitment sets the stage for everything else. You play as Nymn, a fox-like creature separated from the pack after the twin suns set. The forest at night is not friendly. Enemies like the relentless djakks, giant ancient hunting creatures that chase you but cannot jump, force you to think laterally, pushing boulders onto their heads or luring them into spikes rather than fighting back directly. Hoggs charge at full speed and can be tricked into impaling a wall, buying you a brief window to slip past. A scirus squirrel will flee until cornered, then turn on you. Every encounter is a small spatial puzzle rather than a reflex test. Alongside the enemy interactions, small fluffy creatures called fuzzls unlock temporary powers when rescued and returned to their nests, abilities like gliding, slowing time, and taming beasts. Later levels fold in machinery, wind gusts that affect gliding trajectories, and even minecarts. The puzzle design has a steady, satisfying rhythm to it, a constant drip of new ideas that never lets a single mechanic overstay its welcome. The audio direction deserves its own paragraph because it is doing something unusual and, once you accept it, genuinely affecting. Most of the game plays in near-silence, just ambient forest sounds, the creak of branches, the tension of footsteps. Music composed by Nathan Stanley (performing as freezedream) using the Mega Drive's FM synthesis and PSG chips appears only at specific story moments, the way a film score swells at an emotional beat rather than running as wallpaper. The first time a track kicks in after a long quiet stretch, the effect is outsized. Some reviewers found the sparse soundtrack jarring at first, and that reaction is fair, but the payoff for those who sit with it is a genuinely atmospheric forest that feels alive and slightly ominous at all times. There are honest criticisms to make. A few puzzles are vague enough that missing a single fuzzl or boulder placement sends you back to trial-and-error for longer than feels fair. Some enemy placements, particularly hoggs positioned directly above ladders, produce cheap deaths that feel more like cartridge-era cruelty than intentional design. The opening acts are slow, and the PC version has occasionally been mentioned for minor input lag compared to playing on real hardware. None of these are dealbreakers, partly because the game offers infinite lives, dense checkpoints, and an automatic save on Steam that means you never lose much ground. The story, simple as it is, earns a quiet emotional resonance by the final chapter when control shifts from Nymn to Echo, and the ending changes based on whether you have been thorough enough to collect every firefly. That optional depth rewards attentive players without punishing casual ones. Tanglewood sits in a rare, specific category: the small game that could have existed in 1993 but somehow nobody made. It clocks in at around five-plus hours, it knows when to end, and it leaves a small impression that lingers after the credits roll. If you need constant forward momentum and wall-to-wall music, look elsewhere. If you find something almost sacred in the idea of a single developer writing machine code on period hardware to make a real Mega Drive game in 2018, this one was made for you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Tanglewood.