Policy
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The manual mechanic is amazing but this game really falls apart in the 3rd act (the ghost arc) because they nerf your character, but the issue is the first pickup you get after beating the cathedral is stamina, when I think it probably should have been health or defense since the enemies on other areas kill you in like 2 hits and might give you a false sense of confidence you can kill the final boss, wasting all your materials in the process. The poison mechanic also sapping max health is silly, but it's especially silly they through it on the final boss' second phase as well. Meaning if you don't have gas mask equip you are just going to be brutalized, which sucks especially hard if you waste all your resources on the 1st phase only to go grinding for more. There's other issues to like the stamina UI being too small and out of the way, when the penalty for running out is you cant dodge until it refills to full. The sword hitbox feels too small so you can't really get close on enemies either. So you're probably going to die a bunch, but I don't know why they bothered with the currency loss death mechanic if they were going to have the numbers be so small. It just feels like its there to be trendy and try and build arbitrary tension when me losing 20 Bits means literally nothing to me. In fact at any point you could just grind and I imagine if you just grinded for 10 minutes you would make as many bits back as you lost throughout the whole game without pickups. Its just a strange choice, though I do appreciate it staggers enemies and bosses on pick up so it has some utility there. But as a result of the messy and unappealing combat design I turned No Fail mode on a few times without feeling too bad about it, and honestly I would urge you to do the same if you're feeling worn out.
The music is also strangely exhausting for progressive ambient most of the songs seem to be fighting and distracting themselves from pacing piano jittering back and forth like a keychain. There's exactly 1 song I feel nailed it and its the most intense song in the game, The Siege because the piano interludes actually feel more threatening, you have no clue what this giant machine is about to do next, so your holding your breath and the music halts with you. In general they nailed the Siege fight to such an extent that it's almost worth playing for that moment alone, but the music outside of it is just irritating. There's no intensity or sense of direction. Imagine somebody blasts Satie's Gymnopédies in your ear while your trying to play Zelda. The confusion and general inability to focus because of the twinkling aimless chords is kind of a sinkhole on my patience with the entire game. Other people may like it, but it just left me fatigued.
It's funny seeing people refer to all the 'puzzles' in the game, because sure there are puzzles in the post game (most of them amount to Konami Code gimmicks from my understanding). But there isn't really many before that at least I would probably refer to them more as environment gimmicks than puzzles. Not in a negative sense, just the fact that exploring an area to flip 1 way switches is not really my idea of a puzzle. Although you could refer to the map interpretation and general book as well as a meta puzzle for the practicalities of the game, in my case that primarily just boiled down to reading maps and figuring out what spot in the dark corner I missed to go forwards.
I thought the book manual itself being in a different language was incredibly unique, I like that the book is so incredibly useful at every phase in the game and its really nice to look at and see as your protagonist starts scribbling stuff in as you play. As a central gimmick of the game this in particular is EXACTLY what is going to keep me somewhat fond on it despite all my drawbacks. This manual was so intricately designed because it feels exactly like one of those incredibly useful instruction manuals you would find inside a box of your favorite games, but with nintendo magazine style secrets already there. It takes a lot of the design philosophies of these often discarded and ignored pieces of gaming and embellishes the memory of it. Not to mention how brilliantly to scale the maps are, this game somehow didn't have to 'cheat' on your location in a 2D rendering of the 3D space. I feel like it's worth dwelling on just why this is so beautiful, for one it actively reminds you that the world is a game in a way that engages you further, it becomes a toy, something to play around with. The nostalgia trigger here is also great because this is exactly how this would have worked for somebody playing through the first zelda game, flip from screen to book back and forth SHOULD dissuade you from the game as an immersive space but for some reason it doesnt. In a way just playing a game without any physical intervention can be draining and create ennui poisoned tunnel vision. When you treat a computer game as a primary object to get lost in it can be something that weakens or frusterates you. An in game manual gives attention to that and I think comments on an incredibly valid nostalgia of that. I don't think this is an accidental piece of the puzzle, overtime our relationship with games have turned more into digital product for consumption, getting a key instead a running a disc, having it in a systematized inventory steam folder or itchio page with your dozens or hundreds of other purchases, etc. With this small central gimmick, Tunic dares to comment on all of that, and how it can in a sense be preserved by having a utilizable 'guidebook' within the confines of the game. But it does it through doing the concept justice through its tactile pleasantry rather than condemning digitization outright (although it does do this through the quarry energy enslavement reveal, I doubt people are going to pick up on the metaphor outright). Overall I don't think Tunic as a text hates digitization so much as it simply ask what is missing or what is sacrificed in the process, and how do we go about trying to get it back? Encrypting the book with a second language is the touch it needed to keep it balanced between this childlike memory and not just making the whole game easy/disenchanting the memory (after all we never read ALL of those instruction manuals anyway we just liked how they looked).
The main drawback I have about the language mechanic is that when you go to pick something up a non diagetic popup is asking you if you want to pick the thing up in its language, but I feel like you could just replace this popup with the phrase 'pick up/buy?' in our language and lose nothing. It's really more distracting because when I see that sort of popup I assume the protagonist is the one having the thought, and I also assume we interpret the same language by the design. So why is there this other language obscuring the characters own mind?
The lack of dialogue works highly in the games favor because how ultimately simple the story it was trying to tell is. Had the merchant I ran into said DID YOU KNOW THIS LAND IS LOCKED IN RUIN FOR 1000 YEARS BY A GREAT KING I would have been annoyed. Instead the merchant is an eldrich dragon skeleton who says nothing.
I mentioned in my Hollow Knight insight I wouldn't have a great time combing that game for secrets, but I'd much rather comb that game than this one. Some of the puzzles seem dense and a lot of secret chest being hidden in dark corridors is even less engaging in a 3d space. There's no way to mentally just mark off in your head you searched an area already in 3d space because there could just be a prompt you missed, it would be like losing your keys in your house, no matter where you think you looked its possible its still there, its a very sickly feeling combined with the lack of indication. Like, there are a bunch of dark staircases I missed in front of me trying to progress the game normal, no way am I going to be asked to uncover all the secrets.
The only other thing I have to say is this games post game content unpleasantly feels like its begging you to play it, you finish and get after an incredibly grueling bossfight an ending where you get chained up, only to tease you that you 'missed X pages' after. I get the general mood of the game is somber but it feels way too cute to leave you on that kind of note. Maybe I would have felt better just having my character be able to walk away as the world crumbles or something...
Wait, why do I feel that way? Oh yeah, it's because it's exactly what Hyper Light Drifter did! That game handles its cozy ambience and moments of severe melancholy way better than this one, and also has a world with no talking. Let me end on a good note, I'll throw a few more recs out:
If you would like a difficult game with a challenging but fun puzzlecore post game, try Environment Station Alpha or go play an actual puzzle game that develops concepts like Baba is You or The Witness.
If you want to try and play an emotionally difficult but artistically beautiful experience with much better dodge functionality try Lucah: Born of a Dream (I also have to finish this one).
If you're a furry try Dust an Elysian Tail, a fairly easy but incredibly cute voice acted experience.
Hope those suggestions balance out my curmudgeon attitude towards Backloggd indie darling of the month :3
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The manual mechanic is amazing but this game really falls apart in the 3rd act (the ghost arc) because they nerf your character, but the issue is the first pickup you get after beating the cathedral is stamina, when I think it probably should have been health or defense since the enemies on other areas kill you in like 2 hits and might give you a false sense of confidence you can kill the final boss, wasting all your materials in the process. The poison mechanic also sapping max health is silly, but it's especially silly they through it on the final boss' second phase as well. Meaning if you don't have gas mask equip you are just going to be brutalized, which sucks especially hard if you waste all your resources on the 1st phase only to go grinding for more. There's other issues to like the stamina UI being too small and out of the way, when the penalty for running out is you cant dodge until it refills to full. The sword hitbox feels too small so you can't really get close on enemies either. So you're probably going to die a bunch, but I don't know why they bothered with the currency loss death mechanic if they were going to have the numbers be so small. It just feels like its there to be trendy and try and build arbitrary tension when me losing 20 Bits means literally nothing to me. In fact at any point you could just grind and I imagine if you just grinded for 10 minutes you would make as many bits back as you lost throughout the whole game without pickups. Its just a strange choice, though I do appreciate it staggers enemies and bosses on pick up so it has some utility there. But as a result of the messy and unappealing combat design I turned No Fail mode on a few times without feeling too bad about it, and honestly I would urge you to do the same if you're feeling worn out.
The music is also strangely exhausting for progressive ambient most of the songs seem to be fighting and distracting themselves from pacing piano jittering back and forth like a keychain. There's exactly 1 song I feel nailed it and its the most intense song in the game, The Siege because the piano interludes actually feel more threatening, you have no clue what this giant machine is about to do next, so your holding your breath and the music halts with you. In general they nailed the Siege fight to such an extent that it's almost worth playing for that moment alone, but the music outside of it is just irritating. There's no intensity or sense of direction. Imagine somebody blasts Satie's Gymnopédies in your ear while your trying to play Zelda. The confusion and general inability to focus because of the twinkling aimless chords is kind of a sinkhole on my patience with the entire game. Other people may like it, but it just left me fatigued.
It's funny seeing people refer to all the 'puzzles' in the game, because sure there are puzzles in the post game (most of them amount to Konami Code gimmicks from my understanding). But there isn't really many before that at least I would probably refer to them more as environment gimmicks than puzzles. Not in a negative sense, just the fact that exploring an area to flip 1 way switches is not really my idea of a puzzle. Although you could refer to the map interpretation and general book as well as a meta puzzle for the practicalities of the game, in my case that primarily just boiled down to reading maps and figuring out what spot in the dark corner I missed to go forwards.
I thought the book manual itself being in a different language was incredibly unique, I like that the book is so incredibly useful at every phase in the game and its really nice to look at and see as your protagonist starts scribbling stuff in as you play. As a central gimmick of the game this in particular is EXACTLY what is going to keep me somewhat fond on it despite all my drawbacks. This manual was so intricately designed because it feels exactly like one of those incredibly useful instruction manuals you would find inside a box of your favorite games, but with nintendo magazine style secrets already there. It takes a lot of the design philosophies of these often discarded and ignored pieces of gaming and embellishes the memory of it. Not to mention how brilliantly to scale the maps are, this game somehow didn't have to 'cheat' on your location in a 2D rendering of the 3D space. I feel like it's worth dwelling on just why this is so beautiful, for one it actively reminds you that the world is a game in a way that engages you further, it becomes a toy, something to play around with. The nostalgia trigger here is also great because this is exactly how this would have worked for somebody playing through the first zelda game, flip from screen to book back and forth SHOULD dissuade you from the game as an immersive space but for some reason it doesnt. In a way just playing a game without any physical intervention can be draining and create ennui poisoned tunnel vision. When you treat a computer game as a primary object to get lost in it can be something that weakens or frusterates you. An in game manual gives attention to that and I think comments on an incredibly valid nostalgia of that. I don't think this is an accidental piece of the puzzle, overtime our relationship with games have turned more into digital product for consumption, getting a key instead a running a disc, having it in a systematized inventory steam folder or itchio page with your dozens or hundreds of other purchases, etc. With this small central gimmick, Tunic dares to comment on all of that, and how it can in a sense be preserved by having a utilizable 'guidebook' within the confines of the game. But it does it through doing the concept justice through its tactile pleasantry rather than condemning digitization outright (although it does do this through the quarry energy enslavement reveal, I doubt people are going to pick up on the metaphor outright). Overall I don't think Tunic as a text hates digitization so much as it simply ask what is missing or what is sacrificed in the process, and how do we go about trying to get it back? Encrypting the book with a second language is the touch it needed to keep it balanced between this childlike memory and not just making the whole game easy/disenchanting the memory (after all we never read ALL of those instruction manuals anyway we just liked how they looked).
The main drawback I have about the language mechanic is that when you go to pick something up a non diagetic popup is asking you if you want to pick the thing up in its language, but I feel like you could just replace this popup with the phrase 'pick up/buy?' in our language and lose nothing. It's really more distracting because when I see that sort of popup I assume the protagonist is the one having the thought, and I also assume we interpret the same language by the design. So why is there this other language obscuring the characters own mind?
The lack of dialogue works highly in the games favor because how ultimately simple the story it was trying to tell is. Had the merchant I ran into said DID YOU KNOW THIS LAND IS LOCKED IN RUIN FOR 1000 YEARS BY A GREAT KING I would have been annoyed. Instead the merchant is an eldrich dragon skeleton who says nothing.
I mentioned in my Hollow Knight insight I wouldn't have a great time combing that game for secrets, but I'd much rather comb that game than this one. Some of the puzzles seem dense and a lot of secret chest being hidden in dark corridors is even less engaging in a 3d space. There's no way to mentally just mark off in your head you searched an area already in 3d space because there could just be a prompt you missed, it would be like losing your keys in your house, no matter where you think you looked its possible its still there, its a very sickly feeling combined with the lack of indication. Like, there are a bunch of dark staircases I missed in front of me trying to progress the game normal, no way am I going to be asked to uncover all the secrets.
The only other thing I have to say is this games post game content unpleasantly feels like its begging you to play it, you finish and get after an incredibly grueling bossfight an ending where you get chained up, only to tease you that you 'missed X pages' after. I get the general mood of the game is somber but it feels way too cute to leave you on that kind of note. Maybe I would have felt better just having my character be able to walk away as the world crumbles or something...
Wait, why do I feel that way? Oh yeah, it's because it's exactly what Hyper Light Drifter did! That game handles its cozy ambience and moments of severe melancholy way better than this one, and also has a world with no talking. Let me end on a good note, I'll throw a few more recs out:
If you would like a difficult game with a challenging but fun puzzlecore post game, try Environment Station Alpha or go play an actual puzzle game that develops concepts like Baba is You or The Witness.
If you want to try and play an emotionally difficult but artistically beautiful experience with much better dodge functionality try Lucah: Born of a Dream (I also have to finish this one).
If you're a furry try Dust an Elysian Tail, a fairly easy but incredibly cute voice acted experience.
Hope those suggestions balance out my curmudgeon attitude towards Backloggd indie darling of the month :3