Board 8 > So I did the golden path in Tunic yesterday

(+) Yeah! (+)

First time playing. I keep flip-flopping on whether the game is amazing or kinda bad every few hours.

Wish it hadn't kicked me straight into NG+ as I hadn't found all the treasures yet, but presumably it'll be pretty quick to get back to where I was.

It's kinda bad >.>

The idea of the game is great, and I hope they try to expand on some of it in a future sequel or other title, but I just could not enjoy it.

Thought it was amazing, except for the language transcribing stuff, I just looked all that up.

The little things right in front of you the whole time revealed through the manual were cool.

The big picture excessive stuff...not so much. The lengthy revisit segment also a big miss.

There was a lot to love about tunic. Putting me back in the era of gaming where you had to just figure it all out and nothing was handed to you was nice.

A lot of things are super good but I bounced off the game many times as well. I think it has something for everyone, but not everything lands for everyone. Still worth playing. I did most of the golden path and cheated some but it was fun overall.

Yeah I only got one of the endings because I could just not be assed to go around inputting dpad combinations to collect fairies or whatever the fuck I was supposed to be doing, just tedious busywork. I just could not imagine doing it without following a guide, which felt like it defeated the point so I just stopped.

I also never learned the language, that's extremely not for me but it felt like you didn't need it which is cool. But maybe I missed out.

I loved Tunic. GotY 2022.

I just love how much of it feels like a proper homage to Zelda 1, manual and all. In a lot of ways it captured the feel of not really knowing how a game works when you're still young and new to things.

The boss fights were a little rough around the edges, but overall the experience of figuring things out little by little was amazing.

JackMan posted...

Thought it was amazing, except for the language transcribing stuff, I just looked all that up.

It's beyond me too but none of the puzzles I've done so far have needed it, and that includes getting both endings. The one exception was deciphering up/down/left/right for one of the fairies but that's both given to you in the manual and possible to brute-force.

Leafeon13N posted...

The little things right in front of you the whole time revealed through the manual were cool.

The big picture excessive stuff...not so much. The lengthy revisit segment also a big miss.

What part is the lengthy revisit to you? I felt like a lot of the game was about revisiting old areas, so it didn't bug me too much -- but I can see how it would turn off a lot of people.

HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

Yeah I only got one of the endings because I could just not be assed to go around inputting dpad combinations to collect fairies or whatever the fuck I was supposed to be doing, just tedious busywork. I just could not imagine doing it without following a guide, which felt like it defeated the point so I just stopped.

I got all of them like 95% without a guide. If you get the manual page with the fairy checklist and use the seeking spell you'll know the locations of like 18 of them no problem. The other two are admittedly more obtuse. Either way I can see how it might feel like busywork; I think playing tons of metroidvanias has prepared me for this kind of late-game clean-up so it wasn't one of the parts of the game that bothered me.

VintageGin posted...

I just love how much of it feels like a proper homage to Zelda 1, manual and all. In a lot of ways it captured the feel of not really knowing how a game works when you're still young and new to things.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm not sure this is something it does that is actually like... unique? My position here is colored by emulating a lot of games as a kid but like, you can just go and play a game in a different language and you'll get that experience 100% of the time. And usually it's frustrating, not fun! So Tunic excels not in actually making the game a complete mystery, but in making you feel like you don't know how it works while giving you pretty strong guidance. It's something I found enjoyable but makes perfect sense to me how people would bounce off it, too.

VintageGin posted...

The boss fights were a little rough around the edges, but overall the experience of figuring things out little by little was amazing.

They're not great (the spinny camera in some is especially annoying) but I do feel like the difficulty gets overstated a bit, especially re: The Heir. Though in fairness I cheesed that fight pretty hard. But yeah combat in general leaves a little to be desired, I think.

foolm0r0n posted...

A lot of things are super good but I bounced off the game many times as well. I think it has something for everyone, but not everything lands for everyone. Still worth playing. I did most of the golden path and cheated some but it was fun overall.

I almost bounced off it during the mid-game when it feels very combat heavy. In comparison I was able to do most of the puzzles so far without (much) cheating. Definitely needed hints in a few places though.

Copy-pasting my thoughts here from Post Each Time You Beat a Game.

Hey, I also finished this! Bad ending on Saturday, true ending last night. Hintless all the way through, save for looking up the actual true ending requirements.

I was curious and looked back at some other B8 topics on the game to see what prevailing opinions were, and I wasn't surprised to see it's fairly divisive with most people only enjoying sections of it and rarely the full experience. I guess that's enough to make me one of its new champions here, because I quite liked it pretty much all the way through!

Still a weird game to evaluate due to expectations. I came in thinking it might be something really special and... don't quite think it reaches those heights, so from that perspective I guess I could say it was a slight disappointment even if I would call it a great game.

The main gimmick of the manual pages is pretty fascinating in terms of game design, because there's not actually a material difference in learning about abilities you've secretly had all along versus "unlocking" those abilities in more traditional ways, but there's obviously a novelty to it and it FEELS much cooler because it evokes a sense of discovery rather than plot-dictated progression, even when the latter feels earned. Something like Beat Boss -> Find Page -> Interpret Page -> Learn New Ability feels more satisfying than Beat Boss -> Be Taught New Ability, even if those two extra steps in the middle don't require significantly more player work when you really stop to think about it. It also makes a difference for subsequent playthroughs, of course, but I think that's more of a minor positive point since much of the rest of the game doesn't necessarily lend itself to repeat plays.

I'm not without my criticisms. The boss fights range from annoying to just okay - don't know that there's any I'd really call "good," at least by the standards of the creativity present in the rest of the game. I also think the D-Pad inputs as a puzzle solution got a little overused in the endgame; the Mountain Door, for example, was an extremely cool mystery anyway and very gratifying to figure out, but it would've been even cooler if I hadn't been doing a bunch of other similar (though much smaller) puzzles that led to fairies or manual pages or an outright lame prize like the second sword I didn't need. The different clues that LED you to the correct inputs for those puzzles were mostly varied enough that it's not a big deal, but I do wish it'd been a little more sparing. Oh, and I've also had enough of corpse runs in games in general. On the whole, though, those are fairly minor issues.

Anyway, I don't mean for this to be a full, giant review or anything so I'll stop here. Rough around the edges, but dripping with charm and creativity and super solid execution of a story that's seen a lot of takes over the years. Not a top 10 or 20 game of all time for me, as I originally thought its ceiling might be, but it's one that I do think is greater than the sum of its parts and I'm extremely glad to have played it.

NBIceman posted...

I also think the D-Pad inputs as a puzzle solution got a little overused in the endgame; the Mountain Door, for example, was an extremely cool mystery anyway and very gratifying to figure out, but it would've been even cooler if I hadn't been doing a bunch of other similar (though much smaller) puzzles that led to fairies or manual pages or an outright lame prize like the second sword I didn't need. The different clues that LED you to the correct inputs for those puzzles were mostly varied enough that it's not a big deal, but I do wish it'd been a little more sparing.

This is the exact thing that turned me off from the endgame, unlike how you feel about being led to the solutions, I found it all very tedious. When I know in advance the puzzle solution is just dpad inputs, I don't want to do it. It's less about it being overly obtuse and more about the actual experience of gameplay. Repeatedly inputting the combination for fairy seeking, the process of inputting huge strings of dpad inputs only to have it not work and needing to sit down and go, ok which input did I get wrong. It's just awful. It's so cool when you discover the dpad inputs is a thing you can do, they ran it into the ground. I wish they hadn't because just a little of it went a long way!

I was okay with the d-pad inputs as the main mechanic late-game, even if it got a bit overused. I agree that some of the rewards were lame. I do wish that they had shown your inputs on-screen so you could tell if you were inputting the code wrong or if you just didn't have the right solution yet. There's admittedly an accessibility feature that kind does what I'm talking about but I still feel like it could have been implemented better.

The secret to the corpse runs is that they're less about regaining resources and more about giving you an extra AoE attack that damages and stuns enemies, even bosses. Admittedly most of the game is not hard enough to need it but it really came in handy for me in the Quarry and for the final boss.