Tape to Tape

There is a specific sound in hockey games that has been missing since roughly 1996: the crunch. Not a physics-approximated collision event with a damage number attached, but the dumb, joyful, cartoon-violent thud of a body meeting the boards at speed. Tape to Tape has that sound, and it built an entire design philosophy around it.

Montreal’s Excellent Rectangle — a small indie outfit with, apparently, an unhealthy relationship to the SNES era — launched this into Steam Early Access on May 3, 2023 at $15.99. The pitch is a category error in the best sense. Take the pick-up-and-play arcade hockey of NHL ‘94, strip out every licensed logo and salary-cap spreadsheet, and run it through a roguelite campaign structure. You don’t manage a franchise. You assemble a gang of weirdos across a three-act, branching-map run, and you try to survive to the end.

This positions the game in genuinely open territory. The licensed hockey market is a duopoly of simulation products with annualized release cadences and menus that require a flowchart. The arcade end has been abandoned so thoroughly that “spiritual successor to NHL ‘94” now functions as a marketing category unto itself. Tape to Tape isn’t competing with EA’s product. It’s competing with your memory of a product that no longer exists, which is a far harder benchmark — nostalgia is undefeated — and it clears it more often than it doesn’t.

The Steam audience has responded well, and that is a strong sign for a game that is still, formally, unfinished. It’s also a reception that conceals a split this review returns to repeatedly: the people who love this game are overwhelmingly playing it with other humans in the same room.

• Roguelite Campaign with Real Teeth: A three-act run across a branching map. You recruit players with distinct traits, hunt for synergies between them, stack artifacts and power-ups, and spend earnings with the Blademaster on permanent upgrades between attempts. The meta-progression is the hook that turns a failed run into the next run.
• Physics-First Hockey: Dynamic puck physics, dekes, one-timers, and body checks that carry weight. Goalies react to the situation rather than triggering from a canned animation library — an ambitious call with real consequences in both directions.
• Ten-Player Local Split-Screen: A full 5-on-5 of actual humans, playable cooperatively through the campaign or competitively against each other. Extendable through Steam Remote Play, but with no native online multiplayer.
• 40+ Teams and Boss Encounters: Distinct colors, quirks, and personalities, plus boss teams that function as genuine skill checks and tournament modes outside the campaign.
• Referee Bribery: You can pay off the officials. A joke that doubles as a legitimate strategic lever, and the single best example of this game understanding its own subject matter.

The Gameplay Loop

The smartest thing Tape to Tape does is refuse to let the roguelite layer neutralize the action layer. This is the failure mode of the genre. Bolt enough meta-progression onto a skill-based game and the numbers start playing the game for you — you stop reading the field and start reading the build. Tape to Tape mostly dodges this, because the moment-to-moment hockey demands too much of the player’s hands for the build to carry them.

You still have to receive the pass. You still have to time the check. A run stacked with beautiful synergies will lose to a boss team if you can’t move the puck, and that tension — the build enables you, it doesn’t excuse you — is what keeps the loop honest deep into act three.

The recruitment layer is where the roguelite design earns its keep. Players arrive with traits, and traits interact. Discovering that two grinders combine into something greater than the sum of their stat lines is the same dopamine hit as finding a broken item combination in Slay the Spire, except here the payoff isn’t a damage number, it’s a line that suddenly moves the puck like it’s telepathic. The synergy system is the actual product. Everything else — the map, the artifacts, the Blademaster’s upgrade tree — exists to give that discovery somewhere to happen.

Referee bribery deserves its own paragraph, because it’s the kind of detail you only get from developers who love the sport enough to be cynical about it. It’s mechanically real: pay, and the whistles bend your way. It’s also a sharper piece of hockey satire than anything in a licensed release, which by contractual necessity must pretend officiating is neutral.

Where the Friction Lives

The AI is the weak link, and it’s a structural problem rather than a bug. Tape to Tape’s opponents are competent at the systemic level and erratic at the situational one. They rush the puck carrier reliably; they lose defensive shape in ways a human never would. Against a boss team, this reads as chaotic difficulty rather than escalating skill demand. Runs can be lost to things no one could have planned around, which is exactly the sensation a roguelite is supposed to protect against.

The goalies are the more interesting problem, because the flaw is downstream of an ambition worth endorsing. Building netminders that react to puck physics instead of playing back canned save animations is the correct choice — canned animations are why licensed hockey games feel like you’re negotiating with a state machine. But an organic goalie can look organically stupid, and the design accepts that trade: keepers will sometimes flail at pucks a scripted animation would swallow, and sometimes make saves no scripted animation could produce. That’s the trade, and the ledger is roughly balanced. It’s still the likeliest source of a controller getting set down harder than necessary.

Difficulty balance across the three acts remains uneven. Act one is a warm bath. Act three, on certain paths with certain boss draws, is a wall. The Blademaster’s permanent upgrades are meant to smooth this, but they smooth it by grinding — the answer to “this fight is too hard” ends up being “do more runs,” which is the least imaginative solution available to a genre that’s spent a decade finding better ones.

The Solo Problem

Here is the split the positive reception conceals: solo players are measurably less enthusiastic than people playing with friends, and the design explains why. Tape to Tape’s comedy is social comedy. The oddball recruits are funnier when someone else is reacting to them. The body checks land harder when the person you just flattened is sitting eighteen inches away. Alone, the roguelite loop has to carry the whole experience — and it’s a good loop, but it’s a good loop attached to a game whose peak emotional register requires an audience.

The onboarding is admirably light. There’s no tutorial slog, no five-menu-deep line-management screen. The game puts players on the ice within seconds, checking someone, and that clarity of intent is its most underrated achievement.

The art direction is the least compromised thing here. Hand-drawn 2D sprites and animations composited into 3D arenas, aiming for a mid-90s look and hitting it — not through a filter or a CRT shader, but through actual draftsmanship. The sprites have the exaggerated, slightly rubbery quality of arcade cabinet art. The arenas give them depth to move through. It reads as deliberate rather than retro-by-default, which is a low bar in this era that almost nobody clears.

The 40-plus teams each carry their own colors and visual quirks, and this does more work than it should. Team identity in licensed hockey games is a logo on a jersey. Here it’s character design, and it makes the branching map feel populated instead of procedurally furnished.

Technically, this is a lightweight game by design. Sprite-based presentation over modest 3D geometry is not a demanding proposition, and a 2D-led game of this scope should sit comfortably on most hardware. Ten-way split-screen is the one demanding configuration, and it’s more of a legibility challenge than a performance one — five-a-side on shared screen real estate gets visually busy fast.

Steam only, and Steam is doing this game an enormous favor.

Plan on a gamepad. This isn’t preference, it’s requirement. Dekes and one-timers are analog-stick expressions; keyboard input flattens the game’s entire skill ceiling into a set of discrete keypresses. The mapping is arcade-simple once a controller is involved.

The platform’s real contribution is Remote Play Together, and it’s the crutch holding up the game’s multiplayer story. It streams the local split-screen session to friends elsewhere, and for a lot of people it’s the only way they’ll ever see this game’s best mode. But it is a stream, and streams have latency. In a game built on the timing of a check and the window on a one-timer, latency isn’t a cosmetic degradation — it changes what a player is capable of. Remote Play makes online play possible. It does not make it good.

Which brings us to the thing that can’t be waved off. Years after the May 2023 Early Access launch, there is still no native online multiplayer. For a game whose entire emotional peak is competitive and cooperative play, shipping without it was a defensible scope decision by a small studio. Still lacking it this far in, alongside content updates that the community broadly describes as slower than hoped, has hardened from a roadmap item into a verdict on priorities. The people most likely to love this game are adults with hockey-loving friends who no longer live within driving distance. Excellent Rectangle built a game for exactly those people and then made it hard for them to play it.

Tape to Tape is a rare thing in sports games — a title with an actual point of view. Excellent Rectangle looked at a genre that has spent twenty years optimizing toward simulation fidelity and asked whether anyone was still having fun, then built the answer. The roguelite structure isn’t a bolted-on trend chase; it’s the mechanism that lets a hockey game have characters, jokes, escalation, and stakes without owning a single license.

What holds it back is not a failure of craft. It’s a failure of reach. The best version of this game requires five people in one room, and the studio’s fallback — Steam Remote Play — is a workaround, not a feature. Every year that native online play stays absent, the gap widens between the audience this game deserves and the audience that can actually assemble to play it. The Early Access duration compounds it: at some point “unfinished” stops being a promise and starts being a description.

We recommend it — to the right audience. What’s here is sharp, funny, and mechanically distinct, and the warm Steam reception is not a fluke. Just be honest about how many of those players are sitting next to each other, and about whether that describes your living room.