After I posted today’s Blaugust prompts, especially the bit about the origin of most of my characters’ last name, “Tanglewood”, Bhagpuss commented that there was actually a game by that name, back awhile ago.
I had absolutely no idea. It was kind of funny that he’d also considered “Tanglewood” as the name of his druid.
The 80s-era game was for the Amiga and the Atari ST, and looked like a pretty standard adventure game of the era, with some rather nice graphics to go along with the gameplay. This is back when adventure games were a genre — a genre that no longer exists.
Anyway, turns out that a there is an entirely different game by this same title that was Kickstarted just a couple years ago. This game was shipped as a new, physical cartridge for the Sega Genesis Mega Drive, for those people who still had one of those laying around and were desperate for more games to play on it.
They also ported the game to Windows, Linux and Mac OS. They also planned to port it to the Dreamcast, for some reason. The demo is available on Steam, so of course I just had to download it and see how it played.
In Tanglewood, you play as a young, fox-like creature named “Nymn”. You’ve become separated from your family somehow, and you’ll have to find your own way back to them through several platforming levels.
There’s no time limit or lives; each level can take as long as you like to solve, and if you decide to stop for a nap, most likely you’ll be fine.
All is not fireflies and flowers in the forest, though. Once night falls, various terrors will roam, and if they touch you, you will fail and be forced to restart from your last checkpoint.
Most of the smaller encounters can be outright avoided. The larger creatures, though, must be dealt with, typically be luring them beneath cliffs, on top of which you are waiting with a very large rock.
When that fails, or you find yourself unable to progress, you’ll have to find a fuzzie and guide it to its nest. It will grant you a power for a short time that will typically allow you to continue on.
- Yellow fuzzies give you the ability to glide
- Green fuzzies give you the ability to stop time
- Blue fuzzies give you the ability to control minds
Stopping time is useful for sneaking up to the big brutes and jumping away while they are powerless to kill you. Mind control lets you ride the big brutes for a few seconds, but you’d better have a plan for when it wears off.
I like the game’s slow pace and lack of urgency. If you just simply take your hands off the controller, Nymn will eventually just curl up and go to sleep where she stands. This won’t progress the time to morning for you, though. The only way to progress time is to pass checkpoints.
This looked like the perfect game for speed running, and in fact we found one streamer who had done a few runs. My BF looked up the records and saw that the best time for the complete game is just under an hour.
A platformer without any real boss fights, backtracking or timers? I dunno… might be my kind of platformer.
