I'm a hard sell on games with extreme retro graphics, so I wasn't sure what all the fuss was about with this game. It's true, though, I got pulled into the fun puzzles in each room. I thought the final boss was maybe a touch too difficult and was completely baffled by what was next. I often had to look things up online to figure out the main meat of the game is the egg hunt that follows. I ended up getting 42 of the 64 eggs. Since everything about this game is shrouded in so much mystery (the game itself tells you absolutely nothing) I wasn't sure if there was another fast travel system other than those animal faces. There's still tons of objects and locations in the game I have no idea what their purpose is. I found traversal in the game to get tedious after awhile and so I stopped playing. Maybe I'll get back to it someday. It's a fantastically designed game.

I thought Tunic was a huge disappointment. I love Zelda games. I loved the remake of Link's Awakening. This took the Zelda formula, scrambled it up and confused "fun challenge" for "bad game design frustrating." The central gimmick of recovering instruction book pages is fine, but putting everything in a nonsense language is a ridiculous extra step that only makes things frustrating. I missed out on core mechanics of the game until late game because I didn't decipher things correctly. This is akin to putting together a shelf wrong because you only speak English and the instructions were in Chinese. Is that fun? No. Also, the game looks cool in that isometric view, but since you can't move the camera around corners (unless the game does it automatically), it would be silly to make so much of the game's main paths take you through areas the camera doesn't see. Yet this is exactly what the game frequently does! Lastly, the leveling system made sections of the game manageable, yet the final section of the game (about 20% of it) takes those leveled stats away from you, makes you go through an insane enemy gauntlet, THEN makes you reclaim the leveled stats one by one by revisiting most of the map of the full game. Oh, and the enemy AI is a hoot as well. So many enemies strike you and then run away, making you have to chase them around to get a hit in. Also, they follow you forever, so if you need to get through a section for the Xth time and want to just run through it - you'll have like 20 enemies on your tail by the time they finally chase you to a dead end and kill you. I'm surprised this game is so well-received. It's not souls-like hard. It's just bad. The fox is cute though.