Vinebound: Tangled Together

Genre: Arcade / Roguelike

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Silesia Games)

Vinebound: Tangled Together, released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is a family-friendly Arcade-style Roguelike in the same vein (er, vine?) as Vampire Survivors, with players automatically attacking and instead placing the focus on positioning and making smart upgrade choices. However, where Vampire Survivors inspired the term “Bullet Heaven” for the game’s focus on gradually building up players into powerhouses spewing out a screen full of attacks, Vinebound instead places its focus on co-op play, with a two-person team coordinating movements as the game’s enclosed battlegrounds become increasingly overrun with enemies and hazards.

The way this game pushes players to cooperate and coordinate is via its clever central mechanic, a vine that tethers the two players together. Players that stray too far from each other will be bounced back, and players who get too close to each other will be bounced away, and players will be warned they’re reaching these limits both by the vine gradually growing red and by the increasing rumble indicating they need to get back to the middle distance or be bounced around, although being forcefully bungie-d can have its advantages too, allowing players to plow through a wall of enemies without taking damage.

The vine doesn’t just restrict movement, it also determines players’ attack frequency. As players move around, a flower bounces back and forth between them on the vine, and whenever it touches a player it will trigger that player’s attacks to be unleashed. So while moving apart may give players greater independence and allow them to stretch the vine past enemies between them (something that certain attack types take advantage of), it can also be advantageous to remain close to your partner to ensure better attack frequency as the flower has less distance to travel.

There are other strong co-op elements here too, with one major element of the game being the way players can revive their downed partner by staying in close range to them for a short while, which can be a challenging task when hordes of enemies close in, but this can have its benefits too – while your partner is knocked out you’re no longer bounced away, drastically reducing the distance the flower needs to travel. Plus, when your partner is revived, they’re brought back with multiple hearts, possibly leaving you even better off than before they died. This means moments like these can be risky, but also potentially rewarding.

To be clear, Vinebound can be played in single-player mode, with one player controlling both characters at once using the two analog sticks, and this makes for a fun but tricky challenge as the player is required to multitask, or simply ignore their invincible dummy partner and focus on their own movement. However, this is clearly a game made with co-op in mind, and that is where this game’s greatest strength lies.

Vinebound’s presentation uses cartoony, colorful 2D visuals that cater to the game’s family-friendly play and whimsical sense of humor, with these visuals backed by a similarly lighthearted soundtrack. While there’s nothing here that outright impressed me, I think overall this game has a nice visual style that works well for it, though I think the game’s “fruits and veggies” theme can cause a bit of an issue on occasion because it can make it difficult to see power-ups among hordes of enemies, as they can blend together.

When it comes to complaints, I suppose I do think that Vinebound’s co-op focus makes the single-player a bit of an afterthought by comparison, and I think the game is a bit slim on content. Normally, this would be easily forgiven in a game that’s priced at a low $5, but I can’t ignore that Vampire Survivors is also $5 and offers far more content to explore.

However, while I do wish the scope was greater and solo players were given more to do here, I think Vinebound does a good job carving out its own niche in a genre where Vampire Survivors still looms large over other games using this Action Roguelike formula. In its presentation and its co-op focus with its unique vine mechanic, Vinebound sets itself apart from other games in this style, and it’s no mere gimmick either – this mechanic does a superb job encouraging players to cooperate in a way that’s unlike other co-op games I’ve played. If you have a friend to hand a controller to, I think this game is a solid choice and well worth a look.

tl;dr – Vinebound is a family-friendly Arcade-style Roguelike in roughly the same style as Vampire Survivors, but with a focus on co-op play. These co-op elements are well-crafted and really help to set the game apart from others in the genre, and while I do think the game is a tad content-poor and the single-player gameplay seems like an afterthought, this is well worth getting for players looking for a solid co-op experience, especially with this game only setting you back $5.

Grade: B

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