I really, really wanted to like this. Death's Door was one of my favourites last year, and all this had to be to get me excited was just exactly that again but worse. Despite the obvious aesthetic similarities - isometric view, animal protagonist, Zelda-like, Souls influenced, semi-open world etc. etc. - they're different enough to irk me in all the wrong ways, but not too much as to disinvite comparison.

There's a lot of praise due for the vibe in Tunic, as it does look and sound gorgeous, and the meta layer of finding the game's manual within the game is a cool touch, and well executed.

However, it's entirely let down for me by a few key factors. The most notable is the combat, which is genuinely the worst I've experienced in a modern game in recent memory. It apes a lot from older Zelda games, with the targeting, and one button for attack and one to defend. You pick the equipment on the face buttons like a Zelda game too, though I didn't find much to add beyond the sword and the stick, save for an ice spell. And what a colossal pain it is to find this stuff! It took me about half an hour to find the sword, and maybe another hour on from that to find the shield. And there was so, so much bad combat in that time too that even dipping down to the perma-life setting didn't make it more palatable.

Level design and general traversal also riled me but at this point I'm growing tired of my own written voice.

For context, I've played about four hours and got out of the first major area when I decided to put this down. Reading through everyone else's thoughts on this has me almost second guessing myself, and I may well come back at some point in the future to try again, as I do feel like I'm missing out. If anyone reads this and decides I'm utterly wrong and can help me enjoy this, then by all means correct me.