On its surface, Tunic seems like a game I should love. It's a Zelda-like with a ton of cryptic puzzles and some amazing mechanics. Yet, I can't say it clicked for me that much.

It's one of those games where my every criticism can be countered with a completely rational explanation of why something was made the way it is, so it's tough to me to really talk about it. There are wonderful and exciting moments, the music and presentation are fantastic, but I believe the game could at the very least benefit from a few more types of puzzles.

I never really clicked with its battle system. I'm not entirely sure why you have a full-on Dark Souls-like fighting system with blocking, rolling, parries, and all that. Not to mention it's actually harder in some way since you only have two quickslots for items and the enemies will chase you all across the map. I have definitely enjoyed the second half of the game more, since the fighting was so much rarer.

The puzzles, I find, were a bit of a mixed bag, with the game relying on three of them way too much. First off, there's the basic hiding system where the game hides invisible to your eye paths behind something obscured by camera. I think there are way too many of those, to the point that maybe 10% of active game time you spend going through Final Fantasy IV-like invisible mazes trying to reach the chest. The second puzzle is the most obvious and consists of a really neat cypher you have to crack for additional info and hints in the manual. I've had a hell of a time trying to decypher it, and I did, which felt great! What didn't, however, was the actual translation part which took hours upon hours of staring at the text, most of which didn't have anything of note to say. I felt a little cheated realizing that maybe 90% of text from the manual that seemed so alluring ended up being basic descriptions. Finally, the game has the Holy Cross puzzles. They recontextualize the way you look at the game kind of like bonus puzzles of The Witness. The path to realizing how to solve them is fantastic, but yet again, they boil down to the same puzzle over and over again and just pattern recognition. A few of them are tougher than the rest, but most are, at best, presented in a strange way.

I think Tunic has a great selection of items, upgrade system, and world design. I will never forget picking up manual pages to get new info - easily the best part of the game, however, unlike games like Enviromental Station Alpha, or The Witness, I feel like it's a bit of a one-trick pony. Or, well, three-trick. It's not dissimilar to La-Mulana: a game I would put in my top 5, but on comparison I realized how much more the latter challenged me and how varied its puzzles were: using items, noticing background details, following instructions to input strange sequences, solving mazes, charting maps, decrypting texts, retaining information, trying out all sorts of things. Tunic, I believe, has only a few "eureka" moments, that then stretch into you going around and doing the same thing for a while, which isn't as pleasant.

I want to love this game so much, yet it couldn't tip the scale into an all-time favorite. However, I would still recommend it to everyone.

Gameplay : 9/10, Le livre guide est une idée formidable et les éléments cachés dans le jeu sont un énorme plus dans un jeu déjà très agréable dans la simplicité qu'il parait donner au premier abord.
Visuels : 10/10, Selon moi le gros point fort du jeu, il est magnifique. Les différentes ambiances en fonction des régions sont top, les lumières sont incroyables et font beaucoup pour l'ambiance.
Ambiance sonore : 8/10, Très sympa !
Jeu : 9/10, Le jeu à vraiment plusieurs niveaux de lectures qui se dévoilent et qui rendent l'aventure passionante.

(Reseña sacada de mi cuenta de Steam: APolChrome)

Tunic... una sorpresa sin ninguna duda. Es un juego poco convencional, misterioso, que no te explica nada. Y siento que eso lo hace increíble. Estamos en una etapa de los videojuegos donde todos los juegos con mundos amplios tienen que indicarte con pelos y señales todo lo que tienes que hacer. Pero Tunic no lo hace. Y eso lo hace quieras o no distinto. Empecemos.

Tunic es un juego sobresaliente. En todos sus apartados es genial. Quiero empezar hablando del gameplay y todo lo que le rodea. Que pasada es el título jugablemente. Lo más superficial sería el combate, que hace una mezcla entre Dark Souls (por el estilo) y los Zeldas 2D clásicos (en perspectiva) para dar un combate que parece simple (porque realmente lo es) pero que se hace mucho más complejo. Las boss fights son increíbles. Si no has jugado nunca un juego de este estilo, la primera es súper difícil, pero cuando te acostumbras, es súper satisfactorio esquivar los golpes que te has memorizado de un boss y saber cuando atacar. Si bien he echado de menos alguna boss fight más, las que hay son un 10 absoluto.

El mapa es otra cosa que me ha encantado. Un mapa que sabe controlarse en tamaño y que está relleno sin sentirse sobrecargado. El mapa tiene muchos coleccionables que van desde objetos clave (como armas), objetos secundarios como bombas y más cosas. Tiene muchas zonas y muy variadas, con diferentes temáticas y enemigos característicos.

Siguiendo con el gameplay, quiero comentar lo misterioso del juego. TODO el juego está escrito en un idioma que le es desconocido a nuestro protagonista (incluso en el menú de pausa, donde debería poner pausa, lo pone en ese idioma). No sabemos nada, ni lo que tenemos que hacer. Pero para eso está el manual de instrucciones (la que es a mí parecer, la mejor mecánica del juego). Como si de un juego de los años 90 se tratase, tendremos un manual de instrucciones, del cual tendremos que encontrar sus páginas. Este manual tiene mezcla de idiomas, pero te va contando lo que tienes que hacer y me ha parecido una forma muy original y que funciona muy bien de contarte el mundo.

Audiovisualmente, es otro 10. Es precioso (a mí me recuerda visualmente al remake de Link's Awakening) con una paleta de colores muy amplia y en su mayoría de colores vivos. Aunque la OST no tiene ningún tema que se me haya quedado marcado, está bien.

Narrativamente, no he entendido mucho, pero lo que he entendido me ha gustado. No quiero hacer spoilers, porque tiene muchos giros y es mejor que cada uno descubra el lore a su ritmo, pero os aseguro que os va a gustar.

Me he dejado muchas cosas del juego, pero solo con esto, ya podrás ver lo mucho que me ha encantado Tunic. Cómpralo porque aunque parezca caro, es una experiencia como pocas en la industria actual. Recomendadísimo.

This game is frustrating but it’s got charm. I’d say I’m a fan. has that unique charm to it. The artistic style never fails to disappoint in finji games.

I will admit I did use cheats to finish it but I got time on my hands. And I’m a pussy!!!

The final boss was just.. too much. But I get the story reason why it’s so great. With no spoilers of course. The endings were also dark to borderline cute.

I only write reviews on this site when a game has something(s) that make me feel strongly about it. These things could be either good or bad. Tunic has both.

Let's start with the good. The metroidvania design in Tunic is extremely tight and I cannot praise it enough. To me, this means that there are a lot of things hidden in plain sight that you'll simply walk past the first time you encounter them, however when you see them again after progressing the game, you'll be able to satisfyingly put some pieces together and advance the game in ways that you would have never thought of. On top of just generally good metroidvania world design to support this, Tunic has a very charming in-game manual that you find pages of which also reveals secrets to areas/mechanics you thought you've already figured out, and these secrets aren't just written out for you, sometimes you'll have to pore over every small detail on each page to extract all the information there is (which sounds tedious but works in service of making you feel smart and like you figured something out).

Another thing of note is that there is a large number of interactions between game objects and discovering and using these interactions to your advantage feels awesome (for example. shooting an explosive barrel next to some grass so it sets the grass on fire and damages enemies standing in the grass).

The visuals of the game world and the in-game manual are cute and capture that retro feel from the old zelda games. The sound design is also really good and gives the game a feeling of depth, which I definitely felt helped out when navigating the isometric world.

Now onto the bad. The combat I found to be mediocre at best and uncooperative at worst, which wouldn't be an issue if the game didn't insist on you using it extensively with its bosses. Regular fodder enemies were relatively fun to fight but the bosses, which tested your fundamentals, were an absolute chore and after beating them I usually felt like it was more of a victory over the controls and the unruly combat system rather than the bosses themselves.

Let me break down why I don't think the combat works. It's clear that the combat system in the game is heavily inspired by the soulslike genre of games (stamina bar, dodge rolling, estus flasks that refill on rest) however I felt that the fixed isometric camera angle was often times disorienting and the lock on only made it worse. In soulslike games when you lock onto a target, your camera is controlled by the game and rotates to always look at your target which in turn makes your dodging and attacking relative to the target. In Tunic, since the camera is fixed, the lock on rotates your character to look at what you are targeting but this completely changes how your character moves in relation to the camera so you basically have two different movement control schemes based on if you are locking on or not, which is not something I wanted to be mentally keeping track of in the middle of combat so I basically played the game without lock on. On top of this, the game is in orthographic view (no depth), which made judging the 3D space when trying to dodge very unintuitive for me. In sum, The developer wanted a soulslike combat system but was forced to work with it within the confines of an isometric game. Unfortunately, camera control is one of those finely tuned things in a soulslike game that we all take for granted (until it gets us killed lol) and without it I'd argue it doesn't matter how many of the aforementioned soulslike systems you put in the game because your game will not play like a soulslike without this crucial component.

Alright I know that was all pretty negative but if you'll recall from the first part of my review, I honestly love every other part of this game and the superb metroidvania design that ties in with the in-game manual was enough for me to tough it out through the boss fights and finish it. If you like metroidvanias or puzzle games that respect your ability to figure things out, you should absolutely give this game a try.

Finally having finished this game, all I can say is that you should play it.

Tunic takes the best parts of zelda, dark souls, fez, and echochrome and turns them into a perfect package.

It's never too hard or uninviting yet effortlessly evokes all the wonder and mystery of classic adventure games.

To call the game derivative would be extremely unfair, but no inaccurate. Does that make it any worse? absolutely not. The tiny dev team may not have 'left a penny' but it's the best spent penny I've ever seen.

Tunic manages to tap into that rare and ineffable experience of receiving a hand-me-down copy of an incredible video game from yesteryear. No hints, no advice, no manual.

The world is layered with more secrets than you can possibly imagine, harkening back to the many conspiracies of early console games.

The minimalist storytelling, and near wordless narrative capture the existential nature of a souls game but in a way that's far less of a downer.

If you've ever experienced first or secondhand, the magic of a nostalgic video game classic, this game allows you to dive all the way into that feeling.

It materializes that thing that lives only in memories, in a way the actual classics no longer can (for most of us.)

Wow, what a cool game. Some real headscratcher puzzles with the in-game manual, but I really popped off once I figured out the "golden path" puzzle without looking anything up. Like most people, I'd recommend not looking up a guide so you feel like 3000 IQ man when you successfully solve some of these puzzles.

Though if you really want to, you can play & beat the game without engaging in the manual puzzles, but I say you'd be missing out on one of the most unique gaming experiences you can have.

Tunic is really just hiding behind the facade of a 2D Zeldalike, but it's actually one of the most innovative puzzle games I've ever played.

With the green tunic and the red and blue shield, everything in this game screams Zelda and a lot of it plays like it. But the actual gameplay with the dungeons and enemies is just the superficial part. It works well for the most part, but is dragged down far too much towards the end, in my opinion, by cheap gameplay decisions that are only meant to create difficulty. Which almost made me abandon the game.

But the real core of the game is the manual, or rather the pages of it that you find. They are written in an unknown language and you have to understand how the game works from the pictures and notes alone. I've never experienced a feature like this before and I'm amazed by it. But the best thing about it is that they fully utilise the potential of this idea. The way hints and information are hidden on the pages is so impressive. Piecing together the scraps of information and then coming up with the solutions on your own is hard to beat in terms of satisfaction.

Even when you think you've understood most of it, it still goes deeper. Far deeper than I would have the time to invest. So I can really only praise it.

I thought I was in for a cozy, chill, little puzzle-solving game geared towards kids. I was wrong. This is not a fun relaxing game for kids. It started simple enough, but I quickly got frustrated when the fights got harder and all I had was a stick and no shield. In fact, the fights were so intensely difficult that I went right into my violently angry voice in my rage against it. There's no way kids could do this with any success. The soothing music and gorgeous and lively environments were not enough to tame the rage in me after every one-hit murder I endured. I had to put on immortal mode after my eighth death in ten minutes just to enjoy the game and not throw the controller into the TV screen.

When I found more and more pages of the manual and found more interactions with indecipherable symbols instead of English, I realized the made-up language NEEDED to be deciphered. Thanks to the reddit user who figured out that it's based on English, but with text built like Korean. The language would have been easier if it had simply been a pigpen cipher, but it was phoneme-based, and each stroke changed the sound/meaning. It's not learning a cipher at all, it's learning a writing system! Who has time to stop playing the game long enough to decipher hundreds of pieces of dialogue, story, and instructions, let alone figure out the language itself in the first place?? Three cheers to the reddit user who figured it out, and three more cheers for the other reddit user who built a tool to write in and decode it, stroke-by-stroke. And three more cheers to the person who made the interactive map of the whole place.

Thankfully, with enough pictures, the manual wasn't IMPOSSIBLE to decipher, and I figured out a (very) few things on my own. But I still had to look up how to do SO MANY things, and I still struggled. There were key pages of the manual that I was missing, and even after finding them, I still struggled to figure out what's necessary and what's extra (I can't even get started on the extra stuff - there's hidden passages with absolutely no indication, and d-pad codes that seem insanely random if you didn't look them up).

The fast-travel spots are few and far between, which made doing the cleanup after beating the game (I got both endings) too tedious to bother. Would have loved little pencil marks on the maps when discovering hidden passageways, if only to keep me from spending hours figuring out how I got to certain spots once but couldn't find the right path again.

Overall, after putting on god mode, I enjoyed the game enough to keep going. The music was lovely, the environments were gorgeous and engaging, and there was plenty to do! I highly recommend finding the deciphering tool made by a reddit user (it's linked on the reddit entry from the person who discovered how to decipher the language), and keeping that and the interactive map handy at all times. I had over 20 tabs open on my browser, but those two were the real MVPs (whatever that means).

And I definitely recommend going in knowing this is like... I dunno...
Souls Jr.