Yet another indie game that's overrated for its cutesy visuals and unique mechanics. People really need to stop calling this a puzzle game, as there's hardly any puzzle solving at all. All it amounts to is a glorified metroidvania with obfuscated mechanics. Finding out through a manual that the solution to an obstacle amounts to essentially inputting a cheat code isn't solving a puzzle, it's just coming across a password. And that's what all the "puzzles" in this game boil down to - stumbling across the correct password in the same manner you do so with power ups in metroidvanias. This made the manual feel like nothing more than a gimmick, especially considering that the sprinkling of key words in English just give away everything.

By the end, if trying to reach the true ending, the game devolves into an even shittier version of the witness, with a fetch quest consistent of a series of cheat code "puzzles" that often lack an easily discernable logic to them, are tedious, and prone to error by being way too long. The final "golden path" "puzzle" is a combination of everything that makes "puzzles" in this game atrocious, and frankly the entire end game just feels like a jerk off session for the insecure developer.

The level design is also just piss poor at times, to the point I found myself softlocked on one occasion, even though I did nothing out of the ordinary besides explore the map as usual. This was caused by the fact that I went down a one way ladder without completing a previous requirement, but looking back at it there's absolutely no reason at all why that ladder should be a one way. The only purpose it seemingly serves is to create the possibility of a soft lock.

And that's without even mentioning the most egregious flaw of this game - the combat. Like Zelda, its main inspiration, the combat mechanics in Tunic are fairly simple. What Zelda does correctly however, and Tunic fails miserably at, is keep the enemies just as simple. In Zelda, enemies are designed as puzzles in of themselves, and once you figure out the strategy for defeating them, the execution is relatively easy. This synergizes well with the simple combat system, as the focus is on creative use of the simple tools given to you, rather than your technical ability with them. Tunic decides to flip this on its head, and instead of clever puzzling, the game throws a layer of soulslike combat on top of a system hardly deserving of it. The enemies can be pretty tough, but the controls are nowhere as precise as soulsborne games to effectively deal with them. The bosses of course are the worst offenders. They almost always come in feeling like massive difficulty spikes compared to what you've encountered so far. What's worse is that when you die you don't recover the consumable items you used during your last attempt. Since the game's economy is incredibly inflated it makes those same consumables much too expensive to acquire after every death. This turns every boss fight into a tedious grind, where you either have to grind for money, or grind the battle itself until you learn to defeat the boss without reliance on consumables. At least, that's what you need to do if you want to beat the boss without cheesing it. Once you come across the shotgun item the bosses become a piece of piss to cheese, and turn into a new type of tedious chore, a shorter yet less rewarding one.

With all that said I did have fun in the exploration portions of this game, but unfortunately Tunic decides to distract itself from the fun much too frequently in favour of garbage. The plot also totally rips off hollow knight.