Tunic

I finished Tunic recently! This was a really, really, cool game in a lot of ways, though a bit frustrating in others. I had a couple of friends recommend it to me and I managed to get around to it recently (no comment on how long since I bought it).

It had been a loooooooong time since I had played a Zelda-esque game, and this one definitely scratched that itch in a lot of ways. The combat is pretty basic, and actually primarily where I have most of my complaints. Not because the combat is basic, but because some enemies were a bit frustrating to fight and the camera in some boss fights were particularly frustrating.

Specifically how it rotates. There was one fight in particular that the boss was in a relatively small arena, but moving around caused the camera to rotate constantly. It was a little disorientating and made dodging some attacks more frustrating too. There were also some enemies that felt needlessly tedious to fight in terms of health/speed/attack pattern, but I’ll concede that part of that is probably me not having all the upgrades.

Where the game does shine though is the sense of discovery and exploration. A lot of the tools are actually available to you at game start, but you just don’t know them. Instead, you find these mechanics by progressing through the game and picking up pages and then discovering how to utilize them.

This leads to some pretty interesting backtracks and cool progression paths. Discovering secrets also feels really satisfying and the game uses the camera during exploration pretty cleverly to hide paths that you wouldn’t check/find until you knew about them.

Which leads me to another cool thing about the map design, some shortcuts don’t rely on getting to a later location and knocking down a rope/bridge, but rather you discover them when you travel through a hidden passage and come out from a well hidden entrance. That to me was pretty clever and I liked discovering where those hidden passages were located.

If there was one complaint I would have about the exploration/discovery is that after around a milestone in the game, I found it got a little tedious. You gain some abilities to assist in backtracking but ultimately getting around can take a while and some puzzles had some more… obtuse solutions in my opinion.

But still, I had a lot of fun with the game. It got a littttle long at the end but overall I think the pacing of discovering and exploring new areas was really cool!