I had a feeling that I would enjoy this, and it turns out that I was right! Tunic is a wonderful experience, and its quality seeps into every fiber of the game.

The combat has seen a good deal of criticism, and I honestly didn't really have any issues with it. I really enjoyed how the enemies and bosses pushed me to use all the items that I had access to, and practicing good spacing so that I didn't waste any stamina on blocks and dodges was also fun.

The manual is absolutely the star of the show. It takes a really good adventure game and turns it into something really special. The entire game feels extremely well considered, one discovery I made in the late game made me entirely reconsider the structure of the game, and how linear it actually was.

I'm going to be thinking about this one for a long time.

Terra meter: 92%

Story/narrative - 4/5
Gameplay - - 5/5
Sound/music - 5/5
General presentation - 5/5
Overall enjoyment - 4/5

I first played Tunic while spending a couple weeks at a friend's place in Pittsburgh. One day, their roommate hooked up their Nintendo Switch to play Dark Souls. After they were finished, they asked if I wanted to play anything they had; I noticed Tunic was installed and said "fuck it, I wanna try it anyways".

After about a couple hours, I went to my laptop and bought the game at full price. I was having a lot of fun. And now that I've beaten it, I can say that Tunic was and still is a lot of fun. While it may be a bit simple mechanically, I think this game makes up for it by being a truly breathtaking adventure.

It reminds me a lot of ICO (a game I still need to finish already), in how they both use obfuscation and puzzle solving to create a truly immersive and believable world to explore and dissect. While ICO has a decent breadth of content to unpack, Tunic's optional content can feel monumental. The language, the hidden objects, the puzzles. Not everything hits the mark, sometimes I felt like I was either stupid or the game was being a bit too vague, and in terms of gameplay, I think a couple bosses are kinda cringe.

Those gripes aside, I'm really glad I got to play Tunic. This is such a cute, special little game. Might 100% it in a month or two.

This game is cute and you can see and feel the influences they took. It's so indirect in presentation by putting together the manual by collecting pages. I wish it was less obtuse.

It seems to be trending to just throw games together with no direction for the player. The combat is so hack, block, and dodge simple. I really wanted to see this through so about 4 hours in I just decided to look up a guide.

With the guide I was really impressed with the cool secrets and seeing it to the end. I can't say I know what's going on. I don't really care either. Mystery is not satisfying if it's so obtuse. I will quickly forget this game.

Had a pretty good time with Tunic! The more straightforward action adventure stuff is alright, but it's the extra layer of discovering the game's secrets that makes the experience for me. I managed to solve 99% of the puzzles without looking up answers too. It was just this one last thing that basically required the ability to read the in-game language that stumped me, and I was too lazy for that lol. Did that already once with Fez and that was enough!

I do think that with how much Tunic was influenced by Fez, Tunic didn't quite reach the same revelatory high that I got from playing Fez. Tunic may also not have been directly influenced by The Witness, but there's enough similarity to the approach in puzzle-solving between the two, so that also contributed to the blunting of that feeling of wonder and satisfaction that comes from figuring out how Tunic's world works.

Don't wanna discount Tunic's creativity though! Lots of cool puzzles in there that test your perception and pattern-recognition skills, a handful of which I had to rack my brain to solve.

Another easy comparison to make is between this game and Death's Door, but at least with this one, it's actually favorable to Tunic. While I enjoyed my time with Death's Door, the tone of the storytelling was very off-putting, so I very much prefer Tunic, even in just the more conventional isometric action adventure comparison. Tunic's trust in my ability to get through the game and understand its narrative made for a vastly more engaging playthrough compared to Death's Door's overly cutesy and cheeky humor which just made me roll my eyes. I also like how Tunic's boss fights were much more challenging than the bosses in Death's Door. The difficulty felt just right for me.

The manual is a delight. I didn't actually grow up with game manuals, as I was too young to remember much from the Famicom days when we barely had any games, and the rest of my childhood gaming life I relied on pirated/bootleg copies of Genesis/PSX/PS2 games. Also, the only Zelda game I've ever played is BOTW, so nostalgia wasn't at all a factor.

Much like the contrast between the surface-level gameplay and the deeper layer of mechanics, I'm glad Tunic gets bolder with its aesthetic the more you play it. Some really cool-looking levels and visually arresting use of light and colors in there. The music is beautiful, and there are a couple of tracks that are instantly memorable. Love the Shopkeeper's theme in particular! Dynamic soundtracks aren't all that novel these days, but I still appreciate how some of the themes transition smoothly from area to area and what actions you do, with certain instruments coming in and out while sustaining these catchy core melodies.

You can tell that this game takes a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda. It's obvious. Main character in a green tunic. And it's fun that way, puzzles that aren't totally obvious, a fully defined overworld, bosses. The puzzle element of this game is fun, as is trying to figure out the story and what to do. The combat is miserable, however - even with the reduced combat difficulty option the combat is brutal and you die very easily. This difficulty holds the game back, but not so much that it's not worth playing (there is even an option for invincibility if combat is not for you). Worth checking out, in my opinion.

Tunic est jeu fabuleux.
Ce jeu vous transporte à travers la nostalgie et la fascination de tellement de manière différente qu'il est difficile de le décrire clairement. Un jeu mignon avec un poti renard qui a été capable de me laisser bouche bée devant la façon dont le monde etait construit et comment le jeu s'etait joué de moi depuis 20h en me mettant devant le nez les réponses aux énigmes devant lesquelles j'ai galéré si longtemps. C'est à la foix incroyablement gratifiant de résoudre une énigme et fascinant de voir comment sa solution etait simple. Ce jeu s'assoit aisément à la table de toutes les légendes du jeu vidéo, de par tout ce qui le compose, visuellement, musicalement ou vidéo-ludiquement parlant.