Tape to Tape

Tape to Tape, developed by Excellent Rectangle, drops you into a roguelite hockey campaign where you assemble and upgrade a team across a series of matches on the way to restoring the sport to some vaguely mythologized former glory. Each run has you hiring players from a rotating pool, discovering synergies between them, equipping abilities and artifacts, and making event-driven choices at junctions along the route — including the option to bribe referees when legitimate play falls short.

On the ice, the game blends arcade speed with a dynamic puck physics system where the puck deflects off sticks, boards, and bodies in ways that produce genuinely unscripted moments. Goalies respond organically to ricochets and rebounds rather than tracking a predetermined shot path, which keeps scoring from feeling mechanical. Body checks carry weight, and the visual presentation — hand-drawn 2D sprites composited into a 3D environment — gives it a distinct aesthetic that leans into 90s hockey nostalgia without becoming a parody of it.

The difficulty asks real engagement: synergy-building across over 40 teams with distinct player rosters means that team composition decisions compound, and runs end badly if you ignore them. Between runs, permanent upgrades from the Blademaster carry progress forward, softening repeated failure without trivializing it.

• Roguelite campaign with powerups, artifacts, events, and boss encounters
• Over 40 teams, each with unique players and synergy systems
• Dynamic puck physics producing emergent, unrepeatable play situations
• Organic goaltender AI reacting to deflections and rebounds
• Co-op campaign and local or online multiplayer supporting up to 10 players
• Player and team customization including color options

Tape to Tape released on May 3, 2023 into Early Access and has been updated steadily since. Incremental patches through 2024 — numbered from 0.1.14 through 0.1.17 across the year — addressed balance and fixes in regular cadence. The game’s most significant development arc is Campaign 2.0, which entered public beta in October 2025, moved through multiple experimental branch tests, and was still receiving numbered patches as recently as May 2026, marking it as a substantial rework of the run structure rather than a cosmetic update.