Tanglewood: The Modern 16-bit Game
Developers are revisiting gaming’s past and bringing some modern gifts with them
The technology behind gaming moves forward at a tremendous pace. Year on year, new graphics techniques are created, new physics engines, new breakthroughs in sound design. From these advances, genres rise and fall, reinventing themselves or falling into obscurity. It’s easy to forget that only 20 years ago, the big game genres of today simply weren’t possible.
Open world games are a given today, but Grand Theft Auto III was the first time consoles were capable of handling one, back in 2001. Cinematic shooters like Call of Duty didn’t have the graphical firepower to really impress the masses until the very first Modern Warfare in 2007.
The industry is always pushing forward, looking to the future, but how often do you look back? Sure, you might play retro games and admire them for what they were, playing a turn-based JRPG or a spaceship shoot-em-up and admiring them for how they shaped the genres of the day. But what if you took what we know about gaming today, all the lessons we’ve learned along the way, and apply it to outdated hardware?
In comes Tanglewood.
Tanglewood is a Mega Drive game (Genesis if you’re stateside) released in 2018. You can buy it on steam, and it comes neatly wrapped in an emulator to play on your PC. Or you can buy it on a real cartridge and plug it into your actual console for the authentic experience. It’s a modern game, built solely for the Mega Drive console. The developers, Big Evil Corporation, are far from the first people to do this (even though it’s still quite novel), but Tanglewood sets itself apart from the myriad of retro-styled games which fondly hearken back to the old style of retro games, because the game actually refuses to acknowledge many tropes of the era.
There are no lives in Tanglewood, no high scores, no time limit on levels. It’s a 2D platformer about a cutesy fox hopping between trees and fallen logs, which is very in-keeping with trends of Mega Drive games, but a 90’s gamer wouldn’t know what to do with Tanglewood if they plugged it into their dusty cartridge slot back in the day. It’s not a game about defeating impossible challenges, or memorising levels to beat your friend’s high score, It just simply doesn’t exist in that world, when games were still so heavily inspired by coin-munching arcade gauntlets.
Instead, it draws from the decades of gaming history since the 16-bit era. Many have described Tanglewood as having been inspired by the puzzle platforming of Prince of Persia and Another World, and those points are totally valid, but it also draws from the puzzle-platforming of the PS1 classic Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Direct inspiration for the squirrel enemy, which is harmless until backed into a corner, where it becomes frightened and dangerous, is taken directly from Oddworld’s paramites.
Calming lo-fi beats and atmospheric sound effects replace the usual bouncing jazz and jovial boings of 2D platforming, creating a more intimate, personal connection with the world in a way that echoes Celeste. The pause menu places a filter over the screen and displays your collectibles in a tasteful, minimalist style which I don’t think we truly mastered until the end of the Xbox 360/PS3 era. I can’t think of a contemporary 16-bit game that didn’t either whisk you away to an entirely different menu or simply plaster ‘PAUSE’ across the screen (although I’m sure there are some). A 16-bit throwback though it may be, Tanglewood isn’t afraid to pick and choose tropes and conventions usually associated with later eras of gaming.
None of this is to say that Tanglewood is entirely a modern, fresh take on the platforming genre. It’s not — it’s still largely a nostalgia trip back to the 16-bit mascot platformer classics of the day. But it invites the question of what we can bring back to that era. We tend to think of console generations as an ever-evolving medium, constantly pushing forward with little reason to look back. When a console is retired in favour of a fancier new model, there is an unspoken suggestion that we’ve accomplished everything we possibly can with that technology.
But games are more than just graphics and code. UI, gameplay, game feel, genres; all of these concepts keep evolving with each generation, but that has little to do with the hardware itself. So why can’t we take modern design philosophies and apply them to older technology? Sure, everything is more limited, but they say limitations breed creativity. Who is to say that a complex puzzle-platforming game can’t exist on a 16-bit console, just because the genre hadn’t been fully defined back then? The industry was driven so heavily by the arcades at the time, so few thought to create arthouse projects like Another World or Shadow of the Colossus, designed to be played at your pace, in your own home.
All of this is to say that Tanglewood is a very simple game, but it’s incredibly inspiring. It inspires me to think about the future of the medium by looking to the past, and I hope it does the same for others.
