Board 8 > Tunic is awesome

(+) Yeah! (+)

Just finished it. Probably my game of the year unless something amazing comes out.

I love the way that it pays tribute to old game manuals (particularly Zelda 1). I love the exploration, finding new pages and figuring things out. There were so many "Oh shit, I GET IT NOW" moments throughout. The game provided just enough hints that I basically never needed to look anything up with the exception of a few fairies .

Figuring out the holy cross and how to use it felt like a similar moment in The Witness: when you discover that the world is filled with the same type of line puzzles.

I'm not always a fan of games that make me pull out pen and paper, but I think it was handled well in this game.

I'm never gonna figure out how to translate that language though.

I was enjoying it until you turn into a ghost or whatever and lose all your stats

one of my biggest gaming pet peeves. Stopped playing shortly after

I'll try it out when it hits PSN later this year

I feel like it's been even split of people that absolutely love it and absolutely do not love it

MZero posted...

one of my biggest gaming pet peeves. Stopped playing shortly after

...Do you realize that that part of the game is temporary? This is such an extraordinarily weird reason to quit.

Also yeah I agree with the OP. Absolutely loved Tunic. I don't know if it'll quite be my game of the year but it's up there. I did struggle with the game a lot at first - I really hated the combat early on and complained about it quite a lot and nearly bounced off the game as a result, but I stuck with it and the result was REWARDING.

Paratroopa1 posted...

...Do you realize that that part of the game is temporary? This is such an extraordinarily weird reason to quit.

I mean I assumed so yeah. I didn't conciously decide to quit I just didn't feel like playing and started other stuff. I might go back someday

Yay Tunic! I went in knowing nothing about the game, expecting a cutesy Zelda clone, and instead got intense combat, free exploration, and puzzles that gave me the same sense of satisfaction Outer Wilds did when solving them. And the manual is such an amazing mechanic.

SHINE_GET_64 posted...

I feel like it's been even split of people that absolutely love it and absolutely do not love it

Yeah I've noticed this too. I think some people thought it was gonna be a full puzzle game and were put off by the unforgiving combat? And maybe some were the other way around and didn't like how little the game tells you up front. I'm sure there's plenty of reasons people didn't like it, but it basically ticked all of my boxes.

My number two game of the year behind Elden Ring. Definitely a lot of similar thoughts as others here. I'll just post my brief write-up from the "Post Each Time You Beat a Game" topic.

StartTheMachine posted...

Tunic

Man, this game absolutely rules, though I'm a little bit mixed on the post-game, where it basically transitions from a Zelda-like to The Witness. What surprised me about this game is how much I enjoy its original ideas - it's not really the Zelda influence at all that's the highlight here. It's the weird ideas, like assembling the instruction manual in-game, the use of perspective, the more Souls-like combat. There's a lot going for it. While I absolutely don't have it in me to figure out all of its insane secrets without a guide, I have mad respect for games that do these absurdly intricate secrets. Rightfully belongs in the "secrets games" hall of greats, alongside The Witness, Braid, Fez and the like.

I loved it until the nearly unsolvable puzzles became extreme,y frustrating.

Felt like it ruined a great game

The puzzles for me were what ELEVATED this game to greatness, it was just 'kinda ok' until then

I never needed to use a guide, the game gives you everything you need to solve it

You solved the golden path without a guide?

Yup, hardest part was just figuring out how to use the seeking spell to find fairies in the first place, took me a while to even realize that was a thing, and that that was how I needed to get the remaining pages

See, I thought stuff like the spell was fine as it was instant feedback of whether it was right or not.

Stuff like the trophies and golden path I spent hours having no idea if I was anywhere close.

I quite enjoy solving puzzles, I quite dont enjoy walking around for hours wondering what is a puzzle and tunic had too much of the latter for my taste

solving The Golden Path without a guide is incredible. props to Para on that one

I got the golden path pretty much without a guide. Needed to quickly verify I was doing things correctly before I started writing things out, but that was it.

Unless you're also counting the fairies as part of it. I needed to look up a few of those, partly because I was on the wrong track for like two of them.

the one big pet peeve i had was that i really disliked that when you die you lose all the consumables you used and go back to your previous save point instead of just reloading the previous save automatically. you have to quit and reload the previous save manually to keep those items which is very annoying and i didn't even think to do for a long time. when i was trying to cheese some of the fights with the mana berries or bombs/dynamite i'm sure I lost a lot of them by not quitting out fully and resetting to my previous save, and I'm not the kind of gamer who really wants to grind coins to buy them in the shop again

Loved it a lot more than I thought I would. I actually had a pen and paper to write things down. I too did the golden path without a guide (I streamed it too, not the most exciting hour of gameplay), but I think I did check a few other things (which Im glad I did, as I almost locked myself out of the final boss)

VintageGin posted...

I'm never gonna figure out how to translate that language though.

This was my only complaint. I felt the rest of the game gave you enough clues to figure everything out and wasted so much time on this thinking it was the same. When I finally looked it up and discovered that, yes, they actually expected you to just transcribe a whole goddamn language (plus the kinda meh playoff for doing so) it kinda put a sour note on the end of what was otherwise a fantastic experience.

Fun, interesting game. Sucks that you can lock yourself out of an ending because it immediately goes to NG+.

That was patched from what I hear.

If you load your save and attack The Heir after collecting all the pages, it goes into the boss battle.

I was one of the people who did not like Tunic very much and dropped it. I signed up for Game Pass almost exclusively to play Tunic because I thought I'd like it a lot and it just didn't click with me. I had more fun with Death's Door.

I got a little sick of running around the map trying to find the next place to go. I quit after I made it through the poison fog mines after finding the gas mask only to make it to a giant door that didn't have any power to open. I did not have the patience to go back through the fog mines to power up the door and then go back again.

There were also a few times where I'd die really far away from a checkpoint and spend 5 minutes just running back to my body and re-doing an area.

I did like the manual stuff but the combat was pretty uninspired and I wasn't having fun exploring the world anymore so I dropped it. I don't remember any challenging puzzles so maybe if those were about to start happening I would have been more interested!

MZero posted...

I was enjoying it until you turn into a ghost or whatever and lose all your stats

one of my biggest gaming pet peeves. Stopped playing shortly after

ya this. i also stopped here as I didn't want to have to go back around the entire map collecting my stuff again

For those that pieced together The Golden Path on their own, was the satisfaction worth it? The Witness definitely had Golden Path-esque intricate puzzles I DID dedicate myself to, pen and pad out, and felt super rewarded for it. So I kind of wonder if I should have braved The Golden Path and missed out. The secret save file to uncover one of the missing pieces is brilliant.

That said, there was also stuff in The Witness I never bothered completing legitimately. Fuck that one ship puzzle.

pezzicle posted...

ya this. i also stopped here as I didn't want to have to go back around the entire map collecting my stuff again

that isn't what you have to do.

StartTheMachine posted...

For those that pieced together The Golden Path on their own, was the satisfaction worth it?

Mostly, but I found the payoff to be a bit disappointing, so it was mostly just the satisfaction of having solved the puzzle on my own

Although honestly I didn't think it was that hard! Most of it was pretty straightforward? I knew what I had to do and at that point it was just gradually assembling the path piece by piece

Paratroopa1 posted...

that isn't what you have to do.

Isn't this exactly what you have to do? Track across the whole map to get back to the Hero Graves to get your items.

TotallyNotMI posted...

Isn't this exactly what you have to do? Track across the whole map to get back to the Hero Graves to get your items.

Yeah but the way they implied it it was more like having to go back and recollect all the stuff? This is a new sidequest that you have to do because you have to figure out how to get back to all the Hero's Grave locations at night

I just don't really understand why this would make anyone quit? it's no more challenging a part of the game than anything else before it

Paratroopa1 posted...

Yeah but the way they implied it it was more like having to go back and recollect all the stuff? This is a new sidequest that you have to do because you have to figure out how to get back to all the Hero's Grave locations at night

I just don't really understand why this would make anyone quit? it's no more challenging a part of the game than anything else before it

It's not about being challenging. Challenge is good! going to back to weak form after you power up always sucks. It kills the momentum and isn't fun imo

Huh. Yeah, I don't know, I only found that part of the game all the more motivating.

StartTheMachine posted...

For those that pieced together The Golden Path on their own, was the satisfaction worth it? The Witness definitely had Golden Path-esque intricate puzzles I DID dedicate myself to, pen and pad out, and felt super rewarded for it. So I kind of wonder if I should have braved The Golden Path and missed out. The secret save file to uncover one of the missing pieces is brilliant.

That said, there was also stuff in The Witness I never bothered completing legitimately. Fuck that one ship puzzle.

I knew the places i needed to go back to find the solution but at that point a lot of the directional tracking puzzles had grown tired on me so I looked it up.

Really felt like the last third of the game the puzzles stopped feeling clever and started feeling like a chore.

Enjoyed the first half of the game quite a bit.

It's so funny that everyone had the opposite experience as me where I found the first half of this game completely miserable but then in the second half of the game everything clicked for me and it became beautiful

My guess as to why the game is polarizing: it has difficult combat, AND difficult cryptic puzzles. So you have to like both things, to like the game. You're not really allowed to skip either aspect...

And I imagine it's probably pretty rare, for game players to like both of those things. You know, personality-wise, I'd think people only like hard action OR hard puzzles, not hard both.

StartTheMachine posted...

For those that pieced together The Golden Path on their own, was the satisfaction worth it? The Witness definitely had Golden Path-esque intricate puzzles I DID dedicate myself to, pen and pad out, and felt super rewarded for it. So I kind of wonder if I should have braved The Golden Path and missed out.

I also figured out the golden path, and the satisfaction was raddd...

...BUT I don't think you should regret not spending more time on it, if you didn't figure it out. It's not exactly a fair puzzle--you kinda just need a eureka moment. And why wait around for a eureka moment, when you had no way to know if the answer was actually satisfying?

Unless you mean, you just didn't bother to do the effort part of it. That was totally worth it, very fun. The sort of thing where you keep saying "ohhh those sneaky jerks."

I tried it for an hour recently and hated every second. Controls and action is totally forgettable. Later I read it has these cool puzzles and I'm curious enough to try again, but I dunno. It's sounds like Fez, which I loved, but that was also like 10 years ago. There's gotta be something more than yet another secret language that's just an English substitution cipher.

I tthought it was mediocre at best, probably leaning bad game, but it's definitely one of the most polarizing games of the year.

foolm0r0n posted...

I tried it for an hour recently and hated every second. Controls and action is totally forgettable. Later I read it has these cool puzzles and I'm curious enough to try again, but I dunno. It's sounds like Fez, which I loved, but that was also like 10 years ago. There's gotta be something more than yet another secret language that's just an English substitution cipher.

Well, most of the puzzles don't require you to translate the language and are cool.

But some do, and I found that frustrating. I really wish the game had the action elements of a better game like Death's Door and just stuck to puzzles like "Hey, we aren't going to tell you how to level up you have to figure that out" which were pretty awesome instead of "Hey, you need to wander the map looking for specific areas that might be relevant maybe" which were very not awesome

Epyo posted...

And I imagine it's probably pretty rare, for game players to like both of those things. You know, personality-wise, I'd think people only like hard action OR hard puzzles, not hard both.

You know, I like both, but I think the problem was the game had tedious puzzles and I don't like those.

Like the Talos principle was awesome. There were some puzzles in that game I spent an hour on, but once it clicked it was an instant success with instant feedback that I figured it out.

The biggest problem with Tunic is it wasn't even clear at times what you were doing wrong, or even where the puzzle was.

I guess what I am saying is Tunic had too many Perception checks to figure out if something even was a puzzle instead of straight puzzle games which are all Intelligence checks.

Epyo posted...

Unless you mean, you just didn't bother to do the effort part of it. That was totally worth it, very fun. The sort of thing where you keep saying "ohhh those sneaky jerks."

Yeah, this. Once I realized what I had to do, pen and paper an entire colossal line puzzle together, I immediately "noped" out of it and didn't even bother. As Para's saying though, it seems to be a lot easier and less intimidating than it seems at first, so I kind of regret my rash instinctual decision.

I got a ton of joy and satisfaction from the fairy and secret treasure puzzles though. I looked up few of them as well (the line puzzle with the reflections off the tower I felt like I was doing correctly but never got to work), but the majority I did on my own and loved them. Plenty of eureka moments and pure satisfaction.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Mostly, but I found the payoff to be a bit disappointing, so it was mostly just the satisfaction of having solved the puzzle on my own

Man, this. I really thought the payoff would be collecting the final page of the manual would translate the entire thing to English. There's a lot of fascinating lore in there if you look up the translations online, and just being able to fully read all the story stuff in the first few pages would have been dope.

MZero posted...

It's not about being challenging. Challenge is good! going to back to weak form after you power up always sucks. It kills the momentum and isn't fun imo

ya this. i knew I didn't have to recollect the stuff, but I had to wander back around most of the map and just....didn't have any desire to do that

One more aside, the way they handled the equippable buffs I thought was a horrible design choice. The effects of most are too minor to be noticeable - and I mean after like hours and hours of having them equipped, not just immediately. The names are also too cryptic to figure out what they do. So I just equipped ones with swords and shields because I figured they were offensive and defensive buffs that you couldn't go wrong with. And eventually I used a few I did figure out, like the lucky cup and scavenger's mask.

It just felt like an entirely wasted aspect of the game I ignored since I didn't know what they did. I naturally assumed you would find a manual page that fully explained them all, but then there's just a random manual page thay explains like 5 of them, if I remember correctly? What an odd decision.

pezzicle posted...

ya this. i knew I didn't have to recollect the stuff, but I had to wander back around most of the map and just....didn't have any desire to do that

I'm a weirdo who loves stuff like this in games and I wonder how alone I am in that. Just really love learning a map and then having to explore a reworked version of it. They changed quite a bit so it's not like you're just doing the same areas again in an identical manner (which often I also don't mind).

StartTheMachine posted...

Man, this. I really thought the payoff would be collecting the final page of the manual would translate the entire thing to English. There's a lot of fascinating lore in there if you look up the translations online, and just being able to fully read all the story stuff in the first few pages would have been dope.

Yeah, I was actually hoping the same.

StartTheMachine posted...

It just felt like an entirely wasted aspect of the game I ignored since I didn't know what they did. I naturally assumed you would find a manual page that fully explained them all, but then there's just a random manual page thay explains like 5 of them, if I remember correctly? What an odd decision.

If I recall correctly, there's two pages with hints toward what they do. One of them has hints via sketches. So between the two pages and the icons/names you can kinda figure out most of them. The only two that seem pretty difficult to figure out are the Dagger Strap and the Aura Gem.

Guys, literally none of the puzzles in the game require you to transcribe the language, lol. not a single one! I still have no idea how to read it and I did almost everything

_Blur_ posted...

One more aside, the way they handled the equippable buffs I thought was a horrible design choice. The effects of most are too minor to be noticeable - and I mean after like hours and hours of having them equipped, not just immediately. The names are also too cryptic to figure out what they do. So I just equipped ones with swords and shields because I figured they were offensive and defensive buffs that you couldn't go wrong with. And eventually I used a few I did figure out, like the lucky cup and scavenger's mask.

It just felt like an entirely wasted aspect of the game I ignored since I didn't know what they did. I naturally assumed you would find a manual page that fully explained them all, but then there's just a random manual page thay explains like 5 of them, if I remember correctly? What an odd decision.

Oh, this is a complaint I agree with really strongly, actually. I think the idea of having cards that give bonuses they don't clearly explain is fine, but they should be really powerful - especially in a game like Tunic where the combat is extremely hard, it would be very rewarding if there was a 'puzzly' way to solve combats by figuring out what the upgrades do and which ones would be best for each fight. But basically all of the cards are near worthless in power which really sucks. Getting more slots for cards doesn't even feel good because they're so irrelevant! I do think this was a huge misstep in the game's design.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Guys, literally none of the puzzles in the game require you to transcribe the language, lol. not a single one! I still have no idea how to read it and I did almost everything

I was told one of the trophies did

masterplum posted...

I was told one of the trophies did

Oh I don't know about the super secret things, but just completing the game and getting all the fairies doesn't require you to read even a lick of the game's script, 'cause I did that

Paratroopa1 posted...

Oh I don't know about the super secret things, but just completing the game and getting all the fairies doesn't require you to read even a lick of the game's script, 'cause I did that

Yeah, given that there are steam achievements from all of them I dont know if I would call them any more super secret than the golden path. They were the height of my frustration because I was wandering around trying to find where they could possibly be

Yeah, exactly ONE of the trophy things requires you to translate the language. It's pretty infuriating IMO, because the other trophy things are 100x more solvable than that one, so it makes you think you can solve this one too.

masterplum posted...

I guess what I am saying is Tunic had too many Perception checks to figure out if something even was a puzzle instead of straight puzzle games which are all Intelligence checks.

Oh I LOVE this way of explaining it, too many perception checks. I agree. I'll have to remember that language for certain games with this problem.

_Blur_ posted...

Man, this. I really thought the payoff would be collecting the final page of the manual would translate the entire thing to English. There's a lot of fascinating lore in there if you look up the translations online, and just being able to fully read all the story stuff in the first few pages would have been dope.

Strongly agree, that would have been awesome.

Also agreed about the equippable buffs, those would have been fun if the hints about them were better.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Oh, this is a complaint I agree with really strongly, actually. I think the idea of having cards that give bonuses they don't clearly explain is fine, but they should be really powerful - especially in a game like Tunic where the combat is extremely hard, it would be very rewarding if there was a 'puzzly' way to solve combats by figuring out what the upgrades do and which ones would be best for each fight. But basically all of the cards are near worthless in power which really sucks. Getting more slots for cards doesn't even feel good because they're so irrelevant! I do think this was a huge misstep in the game's design.

The peril rings are quite good, and I found the lucky cup to be pretty handy. Louder Echo stuns bosses when you use it, which became part of my strategy for Boss Scavenger. Also being able to turn potions into MP potions was useful the cathedral "gauntlet".

But yeah, none of them are amazing.

The one that drops health drops is really good and yeah the potions to MP potions I made use of in the same way as you, probably the only time strategic usage of cards really felt like it paid off. but otherwise... yeah.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Guys, literally none of the puzzles in the game require you to transcribe the language, lol. not a single one! I still have no idea how to read it and I did almost everything

I was wondering what the heck this was about too.

But a trophy huh? How does that even work? Some sort of a secret puzzle that you can only figure out by deciphering the language somehow?