In my teenage years I played a lot of role-playing computer games. My budget and piracy scope was limited, though, so there were plenty of cool games that drifted past me, and many I never heard of at all. Tangled Tales was one of those. 30 years later (in 2024) there's an emulator called openEmulator that pretty faithfully recreates the fuzzy scanline graphics on those old 80's and 90's machines, and it's inspired me to explore a few of the weird games I missed back then.
Playing an RPG is more like reading a book than watching a movie, so the relatively tiny computing power of last century's hardware could still deliver an adequate experience for a game of that kind. Instead of smooth motion and fast feedback in the controls, they relied heavily on text, static images, very basic sound effects - if any - and the hard-working imaginations of their young audience to fill in the gaps.
But there were also more specific aesthetics in play. The low-resolution phosphor-and-glass appearance of 80's and 90's computer displays made pixels that weren't square, but were instead little halos of overlaid light, giving everything a subconsciously dreamlike - even hallucinatory - feel. The limited palette mandated bold primary colors, with intermediate shading done in checkerboard patterns or semi-random noise, making a visual world somewhere between old Roman mosaics, needlepoint artwork, and the incandescent Las Vegas strip of the 1970's. It glowed and flickered in the darkness, but the things it depicted were usually frozen in place, and often completely ignored the line between two and three dimensional representation.
And so it is with Tangled Tales, a wacky and primitive game that doesn't exactly give you a window into a world, it gives you a pastiche of visual interpretations and relies on you to tie them together. You get tile-based graphics in several conflicting styles, plus a faux-3D view some of the time, plus animated character portraits, plus static illustrations, plus a gigantic text area that looks like a scroll but doesn't scroll. And I admit, I love it, for two reasons: The wacky sense of humor, and those charming character portraits.
Walkthroughs already exist for this game, but I've decided to create this one as a showcase for the artwork, which almost no one would see otherwise. I used openEmulator and screen capture tools, then re-encoded the animation as looping videos. Why would anyone take the time to do this? Well, perhaps it's my adult version of collecting Pokémon.
This is also a more literal walkthrough than the others, giving specific commands, and even precise step counts to find some things.
Character creation involves balancing points called "potential" between four stats. The authors were definitely giong for an RPG-lite sort of experience. I spent all my extra points on charisma.
The game has three parts, each taking place in a different valley. They're not entirely separate: Items you gather from previous parts are useful in later ones.