My experience with Tunic is a tale of two games: the first half of the game and the second half. This was a game I thoroughly enjoyed right up until I didn't, at which point I wanted to pull my hair out and couldn't wait for it to be over. The result is a mixed bag that I'd probably recommend, but just be warned you're in for a world of frustration later on.
First of all, Tunic is a game that wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It's a Zelda-like through and through, and a very well-made one at that. It's a game that harkens back to that old-school feeling of loading up a cartridge, not knowing where to go or what to do, and gradually feeling out the adventure as you find the tools you need to progress through new parts of the world. That world is expertly made here, with secrets abound and a pleasing aesthetic to go along with a wonderfully ambient soundtrack that is easy to jive with - at least for a time.
By far the most interesting aspect of Tunic - and the most vital to understand - is the manual mechanic, in which you pick up pieces of paper throughout the world that comprise the game's instruction booklet. It's meant to invoke games of long ago where you'd need to read through the manual to actually understand it, and everything you need to know about the game will be found here, from the controls to the map to combat mechanics and more. It's incredibly charming in its presentation and as someone that is more than old enough to have nostalgia for this very thing, I found it a largely welcome inclusion that cemented the type of game Tunic is striving to be.
That said, it's not without issues. If you don't strive to seek out these pages, you can easily be left a little confused with certain aspects of Tunic. Some of the game's core mechanics are not straightforward forward and you likely won't figure them out without the manual, which resulted in several situations where I didn't discover them until well after I could have used them multiple times. Most of the manual is also written in an unintelligible fictitious language, so you won't always get as much detail as you'd like with each page. It can be fun to sus out what it's trying to tell you at times, but in other instances felt far too cryptic to be of any use.
The game's major fault - as alluded to earlier - is the second half of the game, where the difficulty ramps up dramatically and ruined a bit of the vibe I was feeling with Tunic up until that point. It's not that the challenge was unexpected or unwanted, but how it achieves this can be, at times, infuriating. Throwing an overwhelming number of enemies at the player, for example, really pushes the limits of the largely competent combat system the game has, where it can be difficult to target specific enemies in a pinch and the game gives you very little in the way of AOE attacks. If you blow your resources (items, magic) you can easily find trudging to the next save point an arduous task as enemies pick you apart from a distance.
Tunic also LOVES to put you in situations where it takes away some of your hard-earned progress by reducing your max amount of HP/stamina/magic when you're in certain states, or some cases slowly draining your health and lowering your max HP entirely (at least until you fix it at a save point). It causes certain late-game locations to become an absolute chore to get through, making you feel weaker than you should be at that point in an adventure simply for the sake of a more artificial challenge. The final boss was also a miserable experience and if I didn't figure out a specific way to cheese it, I'd likely never have finished the game.
All this isn't to say that Tunic is a bad experience - it truly isn't, and I'm glad I saw it through after deciding to play it on a whim. It's the kind of pure throwback video game experience that you don't see a lot of anymore and I almost hate to be negative about it because I do value this kind of thing. What it does well, it does REALLY well; I just wish it had been more consistent about that from beginning to end.
First of all, Tunic is a game that wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It's a Zelda-like through and through, and a very well-made one at that. It's a game that harkens back to that old-school feeling of loading up a cartridge, not knowing where to go or what to do, and gradually feeling out the adventure as you find the tools you need to progress through new parts of the world. That world is expertly made here, with secrets abound and a pleasing aesthetic to go along with a wonderfully ambient soundtrack that is easy to jive with - at least for a time.
By far the most interesting aspect of Tunic - and the most vital to understand - is the manual mechanic, in which you pick up pieces of paper throughout the world that comprise the game's instruction booklet. It's meant to invoke games of long ago where you'd need to read through the manual to actually understand it, and everything you need to know about the game will be found here, from the controls to the map to combat mechanics and more. It's incredibly charming in its presentation and as someone that is more than old enough to have nostalgia for this very thing, I found it a largely welcome inclusion that cemented the type of game Tunic is striving to be.
That said, it's not without issues. If you don't strive to seek out these pages, you can easily be left a little confused with certain aspects of Tunic. Some of the game's core mechanics are not straightforward forward and you likely won't figure them out without the manual, which resulted in several situations where I didn't discover them until well after I could have used them multiple times. Most of the manual is also written in an unintelligible fictitious language, so you won't always get as much detail as you'd like with each page. It can be fun to sus out what it's trying to tell you at times, but in other instances felt far too cryptic to be of any use.
The game's major fault - as alluded to earlier - is the second half of the game, where the difficulty ramps up dramatically and ruined a bit of the vibe I was feeling with Tunic up until that point. It's not that the challenge was unexpected or unwanted, but how it achieves this can be, at times, infuriating. Throwing an overwhelming number of enemies at the player, for example, really pushes the limits of the largely competent combat system the game has, where it can be difficult to target specific enemies in a pinch and the game gives you very little in the way of AOE attacks. If you blow your resources (items, magic) you can easily find trudging to the next save point an arduous task as enemies pick you apart from a distance.
Tunic also LOVES to put you in situations where it takes away some of your hard-earned progress by reducing your max amount of HP/stamina/magic when you're in certain states, or some cases slowly draining your health and lowering your max HP entirely (at least until you fix it at a save point). It causes certain late-game locations to become an absolute chore to get through, making you feel weaker than you should be at that point in an adventure simply for the sake of a more artificial challenge. The final boss was also a miserable experience and if I didn't figure out a specific way to cheese it, I'd likely never have finished the game.
All this isn't to say that Tunic is a bad experience - it truly isn't, and I'm glad I saw it through after deciding to play it on a whim. It's the kind of pure throwback video game experience that you don't see a lot of anymore and I almost hate to be negative about it because I do value this kind of thing. What it does well, it does REALLY well; I just wish it had been more consistent about that from beginning to end.
Reviewed on Jun 17, 2022