A very tight and addictive roguelike with an immensely satisfying core gameplay loop. The toolset at your disposal is very focused, essentially only giving you 3 options of what to do at any given moment - move (accelerate and steer), shoot tether, or swing; the variety comes from the various ship types, upgrades, and, most importantly, just the situations the game puts you in.

Both movement and combat take a bit of getting used to since it's unlikely that you will have seen either of those implemented quite like this before: for movement, you can only accelerate, decelerate, and turn - there is no backing up and no strafing, so dodging might prove more difficult than you would expect, and getting out of the way of some of the quicker attacks may prove impossible without swinging around some other object; for combat, you have no ways of dealing direct ranged damage - instead, you link together objects on the game field within a certain range, making them collide into each other, essentially making the entire map, including enemy ships and occasionally spawning hazmat containers, into ammo. Alternatively, you could try to rip off the enemy ships' attachments (turrets, rocket batteries, torpedo bays, etc.) which requires more careful aiming.

That pretty much summarizes the entire game loop, and while it sounds pretty simplistic, there is a huge amount of decision-making happening, both moment-to-moment, introduced by enemy positioning and attack patterns (especially in the later levels as the complexity ramps up considerably), and long-term, represented by picking upgrades every few ways, some of which can significantly affect your playstyle.
Red Tether also hides a surprising amount of content - initially, it presents as a rather small project, but as you keep attempting runs, more and more upgrades, ships, materials, and mechanics get unveiled. There are no permanent stat increases between attempts, and the whole game is definitely beatable with the starter ship, but there is still a ton of stuff to keep things fresh on subsequent runs (for an anecdotal example - at the time of writing, over 30 hours in, I'm still nowhere near unlocking all of the available ships - it is quite possible that I'm just bad at the game, but something tells me those numbers will be similar for most of the players). On the presentation side - the visuals are clean and beautiful, and the music is bangin, so absolutely no complaints in that department.

Essentially, if you are looking for games that aim to do one thing, and do it outstandingly well; if you enjoy mastering mechanics and feeling your skill level go up rather than just your stats; if you like playing games simply for the satisfaction the gameplay brings - Red Tether is an easy recommend.

Red Tether is obviously innovative, and deceptively deep.

Gameplay starts off simply: you pilot a little spaceship in the vein of Asteroids, with forward thrusters and a brake. If you want to go backwards, you have to turn all the way around to do it. Instead of a gun or a blaster, however, your ship is equipped with a set of tethers. You start off with four or five, but can gain more or less throughout the course of a run; the game is a roguelite, and each zone you travel through has ships that you can tear apart for different upgrades. These usually come with a tradeoff, such as granting your tethers more damage but limiting the amount that you can have out at once, or giving your ship more speed at the cost of a more fragile hull. There's never any "best" upgrade to take, which leaves individual runs always feeling fresh, defined more by what you need in the moment than by an overarching hierarchy of a meta.

The tethers, though, are the main draw of the game, and I've intentionally done them a bit of disservice by glossing over them. See, it's easy to intuit what they do. They pull things towards other things. Things with less mass get pulled towards things with greater mass. Since your tethers are the only means of engaging in combat, then you would assume that your only option in a fight is to pull lighter enemies and pieces of debris into heavier enemies and make them crash into one another. You can do this, and it will mostly work. It will also be exceptionally boring, and you'll inevitably die to some more skilled opponents once they start demanding deeper knowledge of the mechanics.

Your ship is slow. Your ship is extremely slow. At first, you'll think it's because the game is just designed to be slower-paced. When the enemies with good lock-on start getting introduced and you literally cannot outpace them at full-throttle, though, it starts to get frustrating. You're not fast enough.

Then you realize that you can use your tethers to pull yourself.

Since your ship is so light, you can effectively fling yourself towards whatever you can manage to grapple onto. The gameplay immediately turns from a sluggish Asteroids into a momentum-based swinging game, where you're zipping around asteroids and between the gaps in enemy formations faster than their guns can track you. You make the enemy ships start shooting each other by accident. This is also around the same time you realize that making your ship go fast enough can make it deal exponential ramming speed damage; flinging yourself nose-first at an enemy can deal a greater blow than a piece of floating debris could ever hope to.

More and more elements of the game continue to reveal themselves the further you get into it. Ships carrying fuel can be lit on fire with your thrusters, creating a burning zone that constantly ticks away at enemy health. Ice asteroids freeze anything on contact, making ships turn brittle and take significantly more damage. Enemies who have been stripped of their weapons will retreat if they're the only ones left alive, and will linger around and try to telefrag you if they still have armed friends.

Also, this probably has one of the best examples of real-world guilt-tripping I've seen in a game. You can collect intel from boss enemies in the form of black boxes, and they reveal little lore tidbits and hints about the world at large. There's one piece of intel that you start off with, and it's just a record of all the development resources that went into the game. There's the number of work hours, the number of unique assets developed, the amount of music recorded, and so on. There's also a real-time tracker of how many copies of the game have been sold, and it's measured up against the dev hours to determine what wage Stefen of Sleeper Games is getting. So far, the metrics are sitting at about a thousand copies, coming out to a wage of a little over $6.00. It made me sad to see that, because this is a game that deserves a lot more eyes on it; it's also very refreshing to see this much transparency about their financial situation.

Red Tether isn't perfect. It's easy to get bored during especially long runs. I still haven't seen the end of the game, if there is one. It feels a little overlong for a roguelite, but it's really not that big of a deal. I think I'd prefer it to feel a little tighter in terms of length in favor of replayability. Of course, it's entirely valid to come at this from the opposite perspective and say you'd prefer longer runs over shorter ones, and I wouldn't be able to say you're wrong. It's mostly a matter of personal taste, and I don't think anyone is going to consider something this minor to be a dealbreaker.

Not enough people are playing this. Seriously. It doesn't even have ten total interactions on Backloggd at the time of writing. Go play it. It's good.