Whenever I play a game, one of the questions that pop up occasionally is "Is there a point to playing this as opposed to another, similar game?". In most cases, I am able to find stuff that makes the game stand out, and the question goes away. And to be fair to Tunic, there were times playing this were I genuinly felt myself getting impressed with some of the design choices. Unfortunately, those moments were constantly interrupted by a quite different, more negative feeling, and it led me to be kinda…meh…on the experience as a whole.
First of all, let's talk about visuals. The artstyle is cute, the textures look nice. I do think that this type of simplistic cutesy style is starting to bore me a little bit though. It's impossible not to draw connections between this and Death's Door from last year, and in terms of visuals, I think they stack up pretty evenly. Still, even though Tunic's graphics are kinda unoriginal, the game is pleasant to look at, and that's what matters most. Another thing I liked was the focus on visual storytelling. The lack of dialogue made it even more important to get character animations and expressions right, and I think they did a good job. The way the game communicates different things isn't always perfect, but it was kinda nice to not have to understand a bunch of cryptic dialogue in order to progress.
By far Tunic's greatest strength though, is the level design. The world is very compact, feels mostly good to explore, and I really liked how a lot of the shortcuts are present from the very start, just very difficult to find from the wrong side. It's a feature that's gonna help trim the fat on subsequent playthroughs, as well as reward meticulous players going through an area the first time. Granted, I am not a person to play games multiple times, and I don't think I ever found one of the shortcuts early, but the inclusion of them is really cool. As for the individual areas, they're fine. Some of them look kinda bland, and even the more interesting ones fall right into already existing archetypes. The bosses you encounter is the highlight of the game. Even though some of them are kinda similar in theme, they all feel nice to fight, and they all require different strategies, Which I thought was nice. The enemy designs are also good, and there is enough variety to keep things fresh for the majority of the game.
When it comes to the combat, I could probably fill an entire review just talking about it alone, but let's just say it's not good. First of all, it's all taken straight from Dark Souls, but with none of the nuance. It's very sluggish, it takes your guy forever to swing and enemies are staggered for about 0.2 seconds. The slow roll makes it kinda hard to time your dodges. It's also very annoying how enemies will show a stagger animation when you hit them but it doesn't interrupt their windup, making it much harder to judge when to dodge if you're attacking them in the middle of a windup, which you'll almost always do against bosses because they have almost no rest time between attacks. The stamina system is the worst part though. Stamina regeneration pauses while drinking from the healing flask, but combat does not, so god help you if you're low on health and stamina at the same time, because there's no way you'll be able to drink and then regenerate enough stamina before the next attack hits. And you can't use your shield while tired so you're basically dead if you're up against an enemy with a large attack. The fact that you take more damage when you're out of stamina is a terrible mechanic, as running out of it is basically a death sentence. And you'll end up doing that a lot, because the game loves to put you in situations where you're hit with a lot of consecutive attacks, and fuck you if you get hit by the very last one, because it's likely to take away at least 60% of your health, and often more against bosses with harder attacks. I like stamina management, but at least make it fair.
The most important original idea in this game is the manual, and conceptually it's very clever. Building your own helper's book by finding pages throughout the world rewards exploration and meticulous backtracking, and visually it's really neat. I like the way it's structured, I liked the little scribblings and coffee stains, as if it was an actual, irl manual. Unfortunately, while the manual is a good idea, its implementation could have been a lot better in my opinion. This is a game where figuring things out without any help is borderline impossible at times. That's why you have the manual, so you can look at hints. My only question is this: If the manual is so crucial to understanding the game, then why the FUCK is the order and way you find the pages so random? A lot of the time you'll end up accidentally figuring out the different mechanics on your own, and you have to, because the game doesn't give you the right page until in the endgame, and at that point the page has basically been reduced to a collectible. Granted, you are required to find all pages before completing the final puzzle to get the true ending, but the fact that a lot of the information ends up being completely useless really got on my nerves. The opposite effect is also sometimes true. Some of the puzzles are absolutely unsolvable by yourself, but because the pages are scattered seemingly at random, your basically forced to wait until you stumble upon the right page, and at that point you're likely to have forgotten the puzzle in the first place.
Storywise this game really could've used some refining. First of all, the structure of this game literally could not get more boring. It starts out by ripping off Dark Souls and other games by making you ring two bells, one on each side of the map. Then, once that's done, it immediately goes over into Zelda territory by making you collect three magic keys, colored blue, red and green. On top of that, the pacing gets progessively worse as you get further, and the endgame just felt tedious, I found no fun at all in going around restoring your body.
What's worse than the bland structure though, is how the game never really managed to make me care about the story. I think a lot of it has something to do with the lack of characters. I feel like games with a lack of designated story-progressing cutscenes need to have good characters, because it's through them we as the players end up connecting with the world. Death's Door wasn't perfect, but at least it understood this. This game has nothing to latch on to, the game expects you to connect to the lore with no motivation at all, and I'm sorry, but the worldbuilding simply isn't good enough for that. On top of that, the game has the audacity to not even give you a final boss when you get the true ending. This is probably the game's biggest missteps, because as I said, the boss fights are the best parts of this game, and not giving you one when you've gone out of your way to complete the manual felt outstandingly lame, and resulted in me not leaving the game on a high note at all.
So Tl,dr: Tunic is a game with solid graphics, some good level design and a neat way of giving you information, but it's also plagued from beginning to end by a forgettable story and annoying combat. Sorry for the wall of text, but I really wanted to make myself clear here. I didn't hate Tunic, it does quite a few things right and some ideas are definietly worth exploring further, but the final product ended up being a very mixed bag with a lot of frustrating design choices. I can't really think of many reasons to play this over some of the classic Zelda style games that have been out for years, and I doubt I will think much of this after posting this.
First of all, let's talk about visuals. The artstyle is cute, the textures look nice. I do think that this type of simplistic cutesy style is starting to bore me a little bit though. It's impossible not to draw connections between this and Death's Door from last year, and in terms of visuals, I think they stack up pretty evenly. Still, even though Tunic's graphics are kinda unoriginal, the game is pleasant to look at, and that's what matters most. Another thing I liked was the focus on visual storytelling. The lack of dialogue made it even more important to get character animations and expressions right, and I think they did a good job. The way the game communicates different things isn't always perfect, but it was kinda nice to not have to understand a bunch of cryptic dialogue in order to progress.
By far Tunic's greatest strength though, is the level design. The world is very compact, feels mostly good to explore, and I really liked how a lot of the shortcuts are present from the very start, just very difficult to find from the wrong side. It's a feature that's gonna help trim the fat on subsequent playthroughs, as well as reward meticulous players going through an area the first time. Granted, I am not a person to play games multiple times, and I don't think I ever found one of the shortcuts early, but the inclusion of them is really cool. As for the individual areas, they're fine. Some of them look kinda bland, and even the more interesting ones fall right into already existing archetypes. The bosses you encounter is the highlight of the game. Even though some of them are kinda similar in theme, they all feel nice to fight, and they all require different strategies, Which I thought was nice. The enemy designs are also good, and there is enough variety to keep things fresh for the majority of the game.
When it comes to the combat, I could probably fill an entire review just talking about it alone, but let's just say it's not good. First of all, it's all taken straight from Dark Souls, but with none of the nuance. It's very sluggish, it takes your guy forever to swing and enemies are staggered for about 0.2 seconds. The slow roll makes it kinda hard to time your dodges. It's also very annoying how enemies will show a stagger animation when you hit them but it doesn't interrupt their windup, making it much harder to judge when to dodge if you're attacking them in the middle of a windup, which you'll almost always do against bosses because they have almost no rest time between attacks. The stamina system is the worst part though. Stamina regeneration pauses while drinking from the healing flask, but combat does not, so god help you if you're low on health and stamina at the same time, because there's no way you'll be able to drink and then regenerate enough stamina before the next attack hits. And you can't use your shield while tired so you're basically dead if you're up against an enemy with a large attack. The fact that you take more damage when you're out of stamina is a terrible mechanic, as running out of it is basically a death sentence. And you'll end up doing that a lot, because the game loves to put you in situations where you're hit with a lot of consecutive attacks, and fuck you if you get hit by the very last one, because it's likely to take away at least 60% of your health, and often more against bosses with harder attacks. I like stamina management, but at least make it fair.
The most important original idea in this game is the manual, and conceptually it's very clever. Building your own helper's book by finding pages throughout the world rewards exploration and meticulous backtracking, and visually it's really neat. I like the way it's structured, I liked the little scribblings and coffee stains, as if it was an actual, irl manual. Unfortunately, while the manual is a good idea, its implementation could have been a lot better in my opinion. This is a game where figuring things out without any help is borderline impossible at times. That's why you have the manual, so you can look at hints. My only question is this: If the manual is so crucial to understanding the game, then why the FUCK is the order and way you find the pages so random? A lot of the time you'll end up accidentally figuring out the different mechanics on your own, and you have to, because the game doesn't give you the right page until in the endgame, and at that point the page has basically been reduced to a collectible. Granted, you are required to find all pages before completing the final puzzle to get the true ending, but the fact that a lot of the information ends up being completely useless really got on my nerves. The opposite effect is also sometimes true. Some of the puzzles are absolutely unsolvable by yourself, but because the pages are scattered seemingly at random, your basically forced to wait until you stumble upon the right page, and at that point you're likely to have forgotten the puzzle in the first place.
Storywise this game really could've used some refining. First of all, the structure of this game literally could not get more boring. It starts out by ripping off Dark Souls and other games by making you ring two bells, one on each side of the map. Then, once that's done, it immediately goes over into Zelda territory by making you collect three magic keys, colored blue, red and green. On top of that, the pacing gets progessively worse as you get further, and the endgame just felt tedious, I found no fun at all in going around restoring your body.
What's worse than the bland structure though, is how the game never really managed to make me care about the story. I think a lot of it has something to do with the lack of characters. I feel like games with a lack of designated story-progressing cutscenes need to have good characters, because it's through them we as the players end up connecting with the world. Death's Door wasn't perfect, but at least it understood this. This game has nothing to latch on to, the game expects you to connect to the lore with no motivation at all, and I'm sorry, but the worldbuilding simply isn't good enough for that. On top of that, the game has the audacity to not even give you a final boss when you get the true ending. This is probably the game's biggest missteps, because as I said, the boss fights are the best parts of this game, and not giving you one when you've gone out of your way to complete the manual felt outstandingly lame, and resulted in me not leaving the game on a high note at all.
So Tl,dr: Tunic is a game with solid graphics, some good level design and a neat way of giving you information, but it's also plagued from beginning to end by a forgettable story and annoying combat. Sorry for the wall of text, but I really wanted to make myself clear here. I didn't hate Tunic, it does quite a few things right and some ideas are definietly worth exploring further, but the final product ended up being a very mixed bag with a lot of frustrating design choices. I can't really think of many reasons to play this over some of the classic Zelda style games that have been out for years, and I doubt I will think much of this after posting this.