Tangledeep

Tangledeep, developed by Impact Gameworks and released February 1, 2018, drops players into a subterranean civilization that has lost all memory of the surface world, with the only path upward running through a procedurally generated labyrinth of increasing strangeness.

Each run descends floor by floor through environments that mix procedural generation with handcrafted maps, populated by magical creatures, ancient automatons, and hybrid biomes. Combat is strictly turn-based and grid-based, rewarding positioning and skill selection over reflexes. The job system offers twelve distinct classes carrying more than a hundred skills between them, and switching or combining jobs across playthroughs substantially changes how the dungeon is approached. Hundreds of items feed into the build variety, and dedicated mini-dungeons called Item Dreams provide randomized spaces explicitly designed for powering up gear.

Tangledeep sits toward the demanding end of the spectrum by default but ships with three difficulty modes, including an Adventure Mode that removes permadeath entirely, and more than ten optional game modifiers that can push runs toward the punishing or the absurd. A shared banking system and plantable magic trees let players carry some resources across characters without trivializing individual runs. The monster system allows capturing nearly any enemy, raising it as a pet in a Monster Corral, or breeding it with others for new results. Daily and weekly challenge runs with leaderboard support give competitive players a fixed target to measure themselves against. Steam Workshop integration allows community-created monsters, items, areas, and sprite sheets to be loaded directly into the game.

The soundtrack was composed by Andrew Aversa with contributions from Hiroki Kikuta, Grant Kirkhope, and Norihiko Hibino, giving the audio credentials unusual for an independent roguelike.

• Twelve jobs with over 100 skills, freely combined across playthroughs
• Monster capture, raising, and breeding via the Monster Corral
• Item Dreams: randomized mini-dungeons for gear enhancement
• Three difficulty modes plus more than ten game modifiers
• Cross-character progression through banking and magic trees
• Steam Workshop support for community-made content

After its February 2018 launch, Tangledeep received steady updates through the following years. A Lunar New Year event arrived in January 2022, accompanied by patch 1.51 and a run of incremental fixes through versions 1.52 and 1.53 into early 2023. Development attention at Impact Gameworks then shifted toward a second title, Flowstone Saga, whose demo launched in October 2022 and which released in September 2024. By October 2024, Impact Gameworks announced that Tangledeep 2 is in active development.