Such a cozy experience man.

Everyone has a story to tell, be it the regulars that appear frequently throughout the story or the characters who only show up once or twice. And Jill sure knows how to help them drown their sorrows.

Even though the city in which the game's events take place is heavily implied to be a terrible place, most people manage to get by in their day to day and somehow find their own happines. If only for a few hours, visiting Va-11 Hall-A can help you put your mind to ease. Every dialogue is full of charm and feels real: the hacker who can't find a good enough husband, a pair of coworkers who need to relax or a sex worker sharing requests that seem out of this world. And sometimes that's what life is about, sharing a drink while venting about your troubles.

Time to mix drinks and change lives!

What first appears to be a zeldalike or soulslike, turns into something completely unique that you have never played before; because there simply isn't any other game like Tunic. The selling point of the game isn't the difficulty or the puzzles, its the way you traverse them. In any other game you might get stuck in some part and so you would get a better item that would make it easier to complete, but in tunic that item is knowledge. Have you had known that knowledge from the beginning of the game, everything would have been a breeze. Say you restart the game from the start after completing it. You still have that item because that item is something Tunic cannot take away from you, which is knowledge. And when I say knowledge it isn't just some "most optimal path", it is a literal tool. And thats what makes Tunic different from any other game.

What a tremendous waste of potential, taking an interesting concept and absolutely running it to the ground with a horrible, nonsensical story and neverending tedium. I don’t even know where to start with this.

The story is bottom-tier, with its culmination (if you’ve played it you know what I mean) just being groan inducing instead of the massive revelation it’s probably meant to be. One of the few occasions where the true ending clears nothing up, instead just making the story even more nonsensical.

The gameplay is structured around making you constantly repeat actions to get to make even slight changes to some outcomes. This gets old extremely quickly. This game would have heavily benefited from a rewind/chapter select feature but then it would be extremely short, and it felt the need to pad its runtime by making the player do the most mindless shit again and again.

Animation is bizarre, sometimes it looks natural and sometimes it looks like Sims interacting with one another. It’s very jarring, especially coupled with the (numerous) sequence breaks that can very easily be performed in the game and completely destroy the ambiance of tension of a scene.

Overall it’s such a shame that this game exists in this state. Even in a time where loop games are popular and relatively prolific, this is a creative enough concept to stand out. Unfortunately, it’s pretty awful.

2/10 (both of these for the idea)