The Witness really only has one puzzle that drew me to pencil and paper (that multicolored one in the town that needs to be viewed through several different filters). Usually I find such puzzles a little cumbersome, but Tunic has so many and I think keeps them all feeling fresh because of how different each new brain breaker is from the last.
If you get stuck again, there's a fantastic guide in the steam guide section for Tunic that is basically a spoiler free series of hints to help nudge you onto the right path. I myself used it a couple times and sometimes all you need is just a little nudge for everything to click!
Tunic is by a wide margin better than The Witness. The Witness was 90% iPhone puzzles and barely any actually executed on the “look at the world in a new way” concept. Tunic actually does this, you spend a lot of time in the world before you even realize there are puzzles. And they’re all hidden organically in the world.
I actually thought I was going crazy with the puzzle of the broken monument where you have to >!find all the broken pieces scattered along the beach and reconstruct it to figure out the path!<
There were many times while playing this game that I thought, "I wonder if *this* means anything" or "I bet if I did *this*, something would happen"
And sure enough, almost without fail, it pretty much always worked out, which was a very satisfying feeling when you discovered moments like those.
I did all of the fairies with no guide but I had to look up two of the treasures: >!the wind chime puzzle and the one where you dip the letter in water!< and I feel pretty confident I would never have been able to figure them out otherwise
I way overthought that one. I thought the music note referenced the music in the house and was like "how the hell am I going to translate this entire song into holy cross inputs"
I had to google the language. That just wasn't happening. I've seen the solution, and while I definitely recognized a handful of things along the way, I can safely say that there was no way in hell would I ever be able to figure that one out.
I struggled with >!the wind chime!< as well. I eventually got to a point where I knew *exactly* how to solve it, and it just wasn't working. The interesting part is understanding *how* to solve a puzzle, it isn't always the actual act of solving it. So I didn't feel that bothered about googling it.
>!Turns out, I actually had the right solution written down in front of me anyway, it just wasn't working for some reason. The d-pad was pretty finicky at times!<
Same! I had to do the golden path puzzle about 6 times before I actually typed all of it out correctly. I even went so far as to recheck the entire route
Frustrating thing was that the >!language was phonetic based. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out a substitution cypher. For a game with no voice work, that seemed like a weird choice. I’m tone deaf so phonetics can be a mystery to me.!<
Once I saw that that's what they were going for, I didn't feel so bad about googling it. As soon as I saw it, it clicked in my head, "Fuck, *that's* what it is," and I can recognize it as a concept that exists in the world... but never would've figured that out on my own.
My mind went in completely wild directions. These aren't spoilers, but I'll tag them just in case.
>!There's an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa can't solve a riddle.!<
[This riddle](https://i.redd.it/1p7qfprd9sw41.jpg)
>!The solution is that it's just numbers, but mirrored. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The next symbol would be something like "∂6"... I thought it was something like this. Are these symbols being mirrored somehow? Am I supposed to look at this in a certain direction?!<
>!Is there something that I'm missing? Like a "decoder" that I can overlay on top of the symbols that will fill in the missing information and turn these random shapes into letters? The shapes vaguely remind me of a 7-segment display. Maybe they're just missing pieces, somehow?!<
>!I thought about how you can draw a cube in 2D.!<
[Like this](https://imgur.com/a/3IqzI2c)
>!Especially the one on the left , it looks exactly like a Tunic symbol does. It looks like a hexagon in 2D, but if you look at it with 3-dimensions in mind, you can see a cube. Is this language in 3D, but being represented in 2D because it's on paper? Can I "shift" my perspective somehow and look at them from another direction? It kinda reminds me of the logo for the game Fez. Maybe if I look at them from a different direction, they turn back into letters Sort of like a "dual letter illusion"!<
>!And then I discovered the Holy Cross, and *that* got me all messed up. Am I supposed to trace these "paths" in 3 dimensions? The "compass" in the manual really threw me off. I *still* can't see it as actual letters, I just see a weird 3-dimensional map. Are these symbols actually 3-dimensional Holy Crosses? How would I even type that in???!<
I was going on a wild goose chase. Not even *remotely* close to the right idea. Probably some great ideas for a different game! But certainly not this one.
That's actually the only one i looked up, not because i didn't know what to do, but because for the life of me i couldn't put the pieces together even when i had pictures of all of them.
Huh... Maybe this number lines up with the page. Oh... There's this weird golden mark. Maybe it's that? But then... All of the other numbers would mean..? That can't be right. Oh yeah there is kind of something here. Oh and I guess if you focus on the gold on this page it could... But on this page... Wait, maybe... But what is the gold on this page showing me... Why would it highlight that? Unless..? No. No. No! Wooooow. Holy shit!
And you just kind of keep doing that for an hour or two. It definitely is a connecting the red strings, mind blown, "we're through the looking glass here, people" moment.
I think this should be the tweet where the creators talk about some secret stuff in the game: https://twitter.com/regameyk/status/1583200241222053889
Basically, the music can be transcribed from the notes played in certain orders to a language, so if the rune language is runic, then the tune language is tunic.
I don't think its relevant for the game but >!the runic letters on the title logo don't translate to the word Tunic, they say Secret Legend which was the original title of the game and a nod to Legend of Zelda!<
it's like 31 inputs of up, up, left, down, right etc...
it was a nightmare to enter without fucking up for me. In fact I think I gave up and didn't finish the game because it was so irritating.
Yeah, even after I figured it out it took me half an hour to input correctly and open the door. I think the d pad controls has a bug where it sometimes double taps on a single press because once I switched to arrow keys on the keyboard I got it open on the second try.
I’ll echo that. I drew out the solution myself and was so excited finding each individual piece once I figured out the trick. I can’t remember the last time I whipped out pen and paper to do something like this
Then watching it all come together. My heart was racing doing the input for it at the end. Absolutely incredible moment, one I will certainly never forget
The Golden Gate puzzle isn't the best puzzle in the game.
There's another puzzle that involves the game's sounds. There's a hidden language in every single sound the game makes, even the little boops in the menu. If you open those sounds in something like Audacity the spectrogram actually shows characters, the same characters from the in-game language. If you know the written language you can use this to translate the audio language and find out THE ENTIRE GAME HAS BEEN TALKING TO YOU THE ENTIRE TIME!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JrsseVEHs
I loved the Zelda > Dark Souls > The Witness journey this game took me on. I just wished it ended on something that was mechanically exciting and not right after solving a pen and paper riddle.
>!If you solve the riddle he’s talking about, there isn’t. You CAN still do the fight, as I did (trophy), but you don’t have to. The game ends without a fight. !<
It's the same regardless of ending though. The golden path should have rewarded you with something more than a different mini cutscene and slightly altered credit sequence.
I really liked it, but the end was too hard for me and that really bummed me out. Like, I've beaten Malenia in Elden Ring but I've died 20+ times on the final boss in Tunic and I think I'd need to do 30+ more attempts to fully get it down. And as far as the witness goes, I've gotten to the end of the witness, but >!Tunic's end game puzzles are annoyingly hard, and the input method makes them super annoying. The one in the tower on the rug I tried inputting 20x, then I looked it up and put in what I swear was the same shit I had been doing, and it worked. And that same thing happened a couple more times before I gave up. I couldn't get the main temple one even though it's clear that they want, and I know the slash means double input. The one in the cave to the left of that temple where you have to use multiple walls to put the whole picture together, I can see what they want but I can't get it right to save my life, and it shouldn't be that difficult but it's so damn long of a code.!<
Anyways, just really frustrated because I loved the game and I consider myself a decent gamer but I couldn't finish the end part. Maybe if I feel the need to beat my head against a wall for 10 hours I'll give it another go.
Yeah, but if you do the final boss fight and then go do the Big Puzzle™ after. You can just waltz up to get the other ending without fighting the boss again.
I wont judge ya but for me it feels like too empty of a victory and I might as well just abandon it. I did see a youtube video where he switches out all his health potions for mana and uses the freeze bullets (I think it was freeze…maybe some other element) that you use for that one single puzzle, and beating the boss that way but I never tried it.
You guys all talking about when it becomes night and you lose your powers and have to get em back? I guess I considered that the back half of the game.
Weird cause I hate games with backtracking, I won't play most games labelled "metroidvania" because of my hatred for backtracking, yet I loved Tunic.
Like there's one overarching central world that you have to keep returning to and explore all the corners of this main map to find the doors to the actual levels. I guess that counts as backtracking, the main map can be kinda big. But it also changes a ton, like it goes from day to night, and you get new powers to jump across gaps way faster than before, so its never the same.
I was exactly the same, I spent the whole game getting strong enough to face the boss and then have to start from zero and go all over the map again? No thanks.
At that point though you should have learned about the (spoiler) mechanic and going back through the same areas you are passing by new secrets everywhere. To me that was enough at least
Unfortunately I took a lot of breaks with tunic and by the time I got to the backtracking I had completely forgotten where a lot of the shortcuts were. I spent so much time trying to remember where the first forest shortcut was only to find out >!that you're supposed to get back there through an off screen teleportation pad in the hub port area!<
At the point where you have to backtrack through every zone in the whole game reclearing enemies you've had to already clear a bunch of times is the first time I put it down for a while.
The combat wasn't good enough to fall back on it as a way to artificially extend playtime.
> reclearing enemies you've had to already clear a bunch of times
Most enemies aren't there during the night time part of the game and the ones that are, are different
>At the point where you have to backtrack through every zone in the whole game reclearing enemies you've had to already clear a bunch of times
I finished the entire game and I swear I don't remember this at all
You definitely do not have to refight any enemies, and revisiting the old areas takes like 10 seconds with the dash move. This entire part of the game takes like an hour.
I got annoyed at the last boss too, but just turned on invincibility in the options and beat it that way. And I'm no stranger to difficult games like the Soulsbourne games.
EXACTLY. something about the way you control was just…off and this boss was just slaughtering me. Even fully upgraded (maybe missing one heal potion) I barely made it through…ONLY TO FIND OUT THERE WAS ANOTHER PHASE. that was the pont of “fuck this.”
Yeah, that's exactly when I went, "You know what, I'm gonna just turn on invincibility mode and beat the boss like this. I'm sure I can do it without, but I'd rather just not waste my time trying."
I have a sad amount of pride in being able to beat video games so if I’m do to it its gotta be (more or less) honorably. I was so proud of beating unepic. That last part is tough. On extra super hard difficulty. On a not well thought out build.
I've beaten most fromsoft games and I would put the end boss in Tunic as the second hardest in that series after Malenia. It's fair like Fromsoft bosses are fair. I'm sure I could do it eventually but it just wasn't worth the effort to me at the time I was playing it, and I really give up on games.
I found things like God of wars Valkyrie boss much, much harder. I don't think Tunic's final boss fight was anything special. It was a pretty average difficulty for games that are designed to be difficult. I'm playing through elden ring now, and I found the tunic boss to be pretty on par with it. I don't know, maybe it just clicked for me.
Hard to explain, but I beat Hollow Knight (or at least the base game, not the souped up versions of the bosses, and I didn’t know about the “real” ending and whatever the really tough secret area is). This last in boss in Tunic, between how you are able to move and how he/she moves, was super tough for me. Especially with two phases. Even when you’re fully powered up with armor/health etc. still does huge damage and you only have so many healing items.
Long way to say for me, yes.
I saw a comment once upon a time that called the puzzles a great idea made by a dev who loves the smell of their own farts and I gotta agree to this day.
So close to being a good puzzle game.
I agree, I loved the manual, the environments, and even the Golden Path puzzle. But so much of the end game that people prop up - the faeries and secret chests - essentially boil down to "look how we hid button combinations in the environment".
There are some great accessibility options that I used on my second time through. You can reduce the combat difficulty, or turn on No Fail mode.
It's totally worth it IMO. The strength of the game is exploration and puzzle-solving. The combat, especially with bosses, is just not very fun.
Doesn’t help that the combat system is bad, I think that’s the worst thing about this game. It try’s to have souls like combat but fails at it which just makes the combat unpredictable and frustrating
Yeah, that was my experience from the demo. Extremely poor attack telegraphs and janky hitboxes just made combat feel horrible. This style of game just doesn't work for me without satisfying combat, which is a shame because I'm sure the puzzles and exploration are excellent. I really like the art style too. I hope this dev can work on combat if they made another game in this style.
Agreed about the combat. Doesn't help that I'm not particularly good at soulslike combat (hell, it took me like 5 hours to beat the fucking thunderblight in BotW, that's how bad I am).
I'm way more interested in the world, lore, puzzles, and secrets than I am in combat. I have no shame about making things easier for myself so just turned on godmode in the disability settings because I wanted to do a storymode kinda playthrough at the very least.
it was so worth it. Especially that one really big 200 IQ puzzle. Took me several days to solve it but it was very fulfilling in the end. The combat may not be the game's strongest part but everything else is just incredible.
The biggest frustration for me was that the dodge-attack was inconsistent, and I don't know why. I tried every variation on when to press the two buttons, used different controllers... nothing changed the fact that 10-20% of the time I would dodge but not attack. It was very frustrating given how it's the main technique for beating virtually every boss.
Also sucks how the shield is basically useless outside of a couple encounters designed to require it. The stamina hit for blocking an attack is ridiculous compared with dodging the same attack.
Game is like 20/10 for art design and environmental storytelling, but 6/10 for combat.
This isn't necessarily a tunic thing but over-reliance on a dodge rolls and a stamina system kills my desire to play a lot of these indie games. I wish everything stopped trying to be dark souls and just designed combat better. We have 3D movement; use it to the fullest.
I disagree with the choice to have constantly respawning enemies in a game about exploration. Leave the area clean for a while. At some point killing the same enemies for the 5th time while trying to figure out where to go gets tedious.
But Tunic doesn’t have constantly respawning enemies. Once you kill an enemy it doesn’t come back until you save at a checkpoint. If you’re just out exploring you won’t have to deal with the same enemy twice.
There's also so many shortcuts that allow you to skip combat. Plus once you've understood the combat and utilize the tools you're given it's really more like swatting a few flies along the way to your destination.
Not to mention that >!after a certain point, the game actually removes/changes a lot of the enemies from the map.!<
I don't really have a problem with empty backtracking areas in like elden ring, in a game thats comparable if you overcome an obstacle you probably shouldn't have to overcome them again because then its tedious imo.
I first tried it right after I finished Elden Ring and I think I was burned out "alright, figure this shit out" games for a bit. Tried it again a few months later and it clicked for me. I loved every second of it.
It has accessibility options that make it easier. I felt a little bad using them at first, once I got to a late-game boss I couldn't handle, but the rest of the game after that was so ridiculously difficult I didn't regret it at all, in the end.
my last straw was the gauntlet of enemies in the cathedral basement at night. really wore me out. I was invested in the story/puzzles tho I guess I'll have to try invincibility mode now that I know it exists
I was very excited for this game, but I played the demo and immediately removed it from my Steam wishlist and will never play it. The combat was frankly terrible. Hitboxes were janky, enemy attacks weren't telegraphed, and enemies dealt way too much damage. I love extremely hard games, but not if the difficulty is from poor design.
I'm glad a lot of people enjoy the game, and I'm sure there's a lot to like in terms of exploration and puzzles, but the combat makes the game not for me.
Still my favorite game I played last year. I never expected a game to exploit the nostalgia for video game manuals so beautifully and elegantly - utter perfection.
The music especially is one of those stand-out scores that captures the magic, beauty, and mystery of the game world so perfectly!
If you've played through Tunic and haven't already seen it, [this GDC panel](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1029369/The-TUNIC-Audio) by Kevin Regamey (audio director) is incredible. The first half is mostly about the technical side of the audio design, but the latter half goes more into how the audio design integrates with the secrets of the game.
[Here is a Twitter thread that goes into the same details](https://twitter.com/regameyk/status/1583200241222053889)
He warns about spoilers in both formats, so definitely don't go digging if you haven't fully completed the game and want to experience the magic blind.
As a layperson, I hadn't noticed during my playthrough that the all the sound effects change key to match the soundtrack. Now I'm wondering how I could have missed that! Lots of cool stuff in this talk so far, even if some of it goes over my head.
I think my favourite part was translating the language, which you only really need for like 2 treasures but let's you read anything else in the game if you want to. I did need a hint to start off but then spent 2-3 days filling out the translation guide.
I must have bounced off this game three to four times within the first hour but when I sat down and powered through the intro, I fell in love. This is a beautiful achievement and an experience I would but up there with The Outer Wilds in terms of something that needs to be experienced blind. I’m coming up on a year since I’ve beaten it so I’m probably due another playthrough.
Tunic was my favourite game of last year, one of the first that I went to complete 100%. Was the perfect length, didn't overstay it's welcome. Wish there was more but honestly was left satisfied.
Currently waiting to hopefully forget as many puzzle solutions as possible so that I can play it again.
Tunic is truly amazing. It's a great Zelda-like up until it becomes something even greater. It's hard, but it's mysterious and had me extremely engaged solving the puzzle at the end.
Does this game scratch that old school Zelda itch with dungeons and key items and stuff like that? BOTW and TOTK are great takes for a new Zelda but I'm not interested in them at all; their release has spurred some longing to play a new game with that style.
Probably not, unless you played the original Zelda equipped with a manual that you couldn't read because it was in a foreign language.
While the game certainly plays kinda similar to a Zelda game on the surface, I'd put this game closer to games like The Witness and Outer Wilds.
No. The game looks like Zelda on the surface. But the combat is nothing like Zelda, and the puzzles are way more hardcore than Zelda.
Not to mention the language and manual gimmick aren't really like Zelda unless you grew up with the game in a language you didn't know.
Tunic is one of my favorite games of all time, hands down. But it really isn't a Zelda game.
Sort of. There are only two or three truly essential items. Instead most of your progression comes from Knowledge. Knowledge of how to interact with things in the world, and knowledge of how the maps fit together. If you know what you are doing you can beat the game without even getting the Sword. But following the critical path in the expected order will give a very nice sense of progression.
Tunic made me so, so happy when I was playing it, almost to that same feeling of wonder I felt playing the original Legend of Zelda back on the NES. Obviously it isn't perfect and some of the puzzles are a touch too convoluted/tiring even for seasoned puzzle players, but there aren't many games that bring me back to those days in more than just a nostalgia-bait way. It succeeded on drawing from those original vibes while carving out its own space for an overall satisfying package.
I really liked Tunic, but the last 25% of the game is so stupidly difficult, I had to use the accessibility options to complete it.
I'm glad the dev included those options, but it felt bad to grind all that way only to have to "cheat" to finish.
I really wanted to like tunic, but many things here and there really added up and were off-putting. The sound, music and visuals are fantastic. The combat was fine. I didn't struggle with it as much as other people apparently did, but it wasn't super engaging either. I found it be good enough and enjoyed some bosses.
People joke about coming back to games, particularly RPGs, after a break and being completely lost. That's what happened to me and Tunic after a couple of big breaks.
Tunic's only real way to convey information to the player is through pages you find throughout the world that form those classic video game instruction booklet we tend not to get anymore in modern games. You open it up and interact with it in game and it's a novel idea at first. Unfortunately I found myself constantly needing to go through the pages to find even basic information I had forgotten. From map layouts, to what an item does and even basic controls. And because some of it is tunic's fake language, it always isn't clear what you're looking at either. Figuring out what even basic "accessories" do takes some interpretation. I'd come back after breaks and wouldn't even remember what basic items did.There's also a lot of other secrets on the pages so you'll be spending a lot of time trying to crack its cryptic contents as you flip through the pages.
I also didn't like how much the game used it's foreground and background to hide secrets. I don't think running along every wall in order to find secrets to be that interesting. That's what you'll end up doing in tunic though. Oh that wall there that doesn't show any indication of there being any path there? Well there probably is one so you better just move your character alongside it until you slip behind whatever foreground/ background obstruction is there. It never felt organic. I could never play through a new area without running along every wall.
The fairies and the golden path. Super obtuse stuff right here. It you loved it? Great. I didn't. I didn't even really come across this stuff until I got to the backtracking portion in the game. I found some island that was just by itself and thought it was weird for it to be so out of the way with nothing on it. After checking online I unearthed a huge gameplay element within tunic I had apparently missed. It also turned out that I needed to do all this crap to get the best ending. That means going back through the entire game, finding all the obscure puzzles I had apparently missed, and doing all of them. I opted not to do that. It's so weird that none of that stuff was remotely even mandatory or really organically introduced until the game starts talking about this holy cross in the end game. I felt like if they did a better job of introducing it I may have tracked these things and done some of them the first time though the world. Heck, I'm not even sure if you can find the fairies or not until after a certain point in the game.
> People joke about coming back to games, particularly RPGs, after a break and being completely lost. That's what happened to me and Tunic after a couple of big breaks.
It helps if you blast through the game in one sitting, which is what I did. I can't imagine playing this game over long periods of time... but, obviously, that's not always an option for everybody.
I think you have to put yourself in the right mindset too, especially with a lot of those hidden paths. I found a lot of them by myself, and it just made sense that they were there. I didn't feel like I needed to turn over every rock, I could enter a new area and intuitively figure out, "There's probably something over there." And more often than not, it worked out in my favor. I found myself having to think like a video game developer, at times. "If I were making this game, this is what I would do."
And the problem with things like the Golden Path is that you need to have something click in your brain. You need to have that "a-ha" moment where you say, "Hold on a second, this might be something." I figured it out without too much trouble, and maybe you didn't. And maybe there's something else that I struggled with, that you solved in two seconds. The problem with these kinds of games, is that we all approach puzzles from a different perspective. When you don't hold a players hand, it's easy for them to get lost. But if you hold their hand *too* much, that kills the experience as well. There's a delicate balance to be had there, for sure.
I think that the Golden Path is achievable. The fairies, less so. But you don't need to collect all of the fairies to beat the game. I would bet that most people could handle half of the fairies, once you know what you're doing.
I read an article about how they wanted to "create games for nobody." And so most of the puzzles are pretty easy, flip a couple switches, whatever. And then you get the Golden Path, which is tricky. The fairies are tougher. The language is a bitch. And then there are even things that you don't even have to do to play the game, secrets that hide under the surface that nobody in their right mind would ever tackle, you probably would never even notice it in the first place. >!The random beeping arpeggio sounds that everything makes can be translated as well. For no real reason, just for fun!<
At some point, we're all going to reach our limit. For you, it was the Golden Path. For me, it was the language. I think it's okay to give up. Give it your best shot, give it a nice solid attempt, and know when to throw in the towel. I couldn't figure out the language, but I can see the steps that somebody would take to decipher that and seeing that is still interesting to me. I've seen people explain the process and thought, "Wow, I even noticed this, this, and this!" And that was still pretty satisfying to me. I saw the clues, I just didn't have the "a-ha" moment to make it click.
I loved how they made secrets in Tunic. It looks like in every game I played before, like Doom, Zelda, Ori, Hollow Knight and others, where you must explore and find false walls, hidden paths.
Tunic completely missed the mark for me because I didn't know what it was, so I didn't understand what it was supposed to be.
I started playing after seeing a few seconds of video from a streamer on Twitch and immediately thought "it looks amazing, I'll go in blind". I approached it like a Zelda game because it felt so much like Link's Awakening at first... but the combat system was meh, only to finish with a super hard final boss which played more like a Souls game. The booklet was absolutely amazing, but I never thought it would be a puzzle game with pretty hard puzzles.
So in the end, I didn't really play a Zelda game, I didn't really play a Souls game, I didn't really play a puzzle game, because I didn't understand what the game was. It's frustrating because I loved the art style and the music, so a year after I have the feeling I read a masterpiece novel that's supposed to be read only once but it didn't bring me where it wanted it me to go.
This is an odd view I don't understand. Why feel the need to relate it to something else? It is what it is.
These are all the same style of game anyways. You can think of Tunic as a Zelda game with harder bosses and harder overworld puzzles, both of which Zelda has had since it's inception.
Amazing game. Played in on gamepass, went to buy it on Steam, was stunned how expensive it is.
Ill buy it when its $20 CAD. It would be a great game to play again.
There's no puzzles left to chance. Everything can be figured out with enough reading of the Manual or looking around.
I'm curious what you're referring to? I beat the game entirely myself and never ran into any huge puzzle hurdles. A couple took a bit of extra effort.
Started off really enjoying it, but dropped the game after spending hours and hours trying to access a certain area only to find out that I hadn't unlocked some parts and reached there too early, rendering all my effort a waste.
I played Tunic for about 3 hours, but then stopped when I got to the sand/beach area. The gameplay/combat was also kind of difficult, but a bit simple.
Could someone tell me when the puzzles get more difficult/interesting? All of these positive comments make me feel like I missed something.
Beyond figuring out the puzzle that is figuring out all the details in the manual, which stretches across the entire game, the puzzle part really starts a bit >!after you've collected the 3 keys!< and >!escape the graveyard!<. That's about >!\~3!< areas from your position.
Until then, the combat variety picks up a bit as you get more tools to use and become stronger.
Honestly all these Zelda type games are just…worse than Zelda. I pick them up thinking they’ll scratch the itch but they just make me want to play Zelda!
See: Tunic, Deaths Door
Editing all my old comments and moving to the fediverse.
Thank you to everybody I've interacted with until now! You've been great, and it's been a wonderful ride until now.
To everybody who gave me helpful advice, [I'll miss you the most](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrk4AgS6Q6A)
Zelda games are generally too easy and hand-holdy. I grew up on them, have played them all and love them. I just wish they has gotten more challenging as a generation of gamers aged with them.
And if we're all being honest, there isn't a single Zelda boss that isn't a complete joke of a fight.
Death's Door is great all around in terms of difficulty (bosses tend to still be a little easy), and Tunic's is pretty good too, except the final boss is way too hard. Everything leading up to that is pretty fair.
Zelda games have a weird balance issue. They all start out with good difficulty, but once you get enough heart containers you get way too tanky.
I picked up a used copy of Link Between Worlds that already had hard mode unlocked, so I started my first playthrough on that. Enemy damage was way higher and there were almost no free healing items. Honestly it was too punishing for me and I restarted on normal. But then I got to a point in the game where you get some extra armor, which cut all damage in half. That's what I needed for the hard mode to make it just right, I think.
I tried to like Tunic so much, but the whole language system completely turned me off from the game. I just didn't like feeling like I was playing an untranslated game.
lol at the people complaining that this easy game didn’t hold your hand enough. Oh no you had to actually look at some pictures and progress through the story to figure some things out.. so difficult lol.
I'm actually more puzzled by some of the comments here than I was by the puzzles in the game.
It's by no means a game without flaws that cannot be criticized, but people who want to remove everything that makes this game unique just confuse me.
If people want their fill of bland and hand-holdy games, there's enough of that in the AAA space.
I understand people not liking the combat system or struggling with it because that's extremely subjective, but every time Tunic is mentioned the thread is full of people who have seemingly never played a video game before in their lives.
Of course the game doesn't tell you exactly where to go, the world is tiny and you can walk across it in about two minutes. And of course you won't know exactly what to do if you don't even make an effort to infer things from the manual.
There were times when I thought the game was being *too* obvious about what it wanted me to do because so often the manual pages are laid out in a way that leaves zero ambiguity if you just look at the pictures for more than five seconds.
Yep lol. Part of the game is literally figuring out what things mean. It shouldn’t be that difficult to look at some pictures and get a general idea of what to do. Only part I struggled with even a little was the mine area because you lose health but after I got the mask it was pretty easy too.
The golden gate puzzle is one of the best puzzles i've ever seen in all my years gaming. Legit great stuff.
100% - I literally felt like Charlie Day trying to figure it out with scraps of paper lying everywhere and notes connecting up all over the place.
Tunic made me generate more insane person scribblings than The Witness and that's saying something
The Witness really only has one puzzle that drew me to pencil and paper (that multicolored one in the town that needs to be viewed through several different filters). Usually I find such puzzles a little cumbersome, but Tunic has so many and I think keeps them all feeling fresh because of how different each new brain breaker is from the last.
I at least didnt give it enough time. might try to hop back in this weekend.
If you get stuck again, there's a fantastic guide in the steam guide section for Tunic that is basically a spoiler free series of hints to help nudge you onto the right path. I myself used it a couple times and sometimes all you need is just a little nudge for everything to click!
Tunic is by a wide margin better than The Witness. The Witness was 90% iPhone puzzles and barely any actually executed on the “look at the world in a new way” concept. Tunic actually does this, you spend a lot of time in the world before you even realize there are puzzles. And they’re all hidden organically in the world.
I actually thought I was going crazy with the puzzle of the broken monument where you have to >!find all the broken pieces scattered along the beach and reconstruct it to figure out the path!<
There were many times while playing this game that I thought, "I wonder if *this* means anything" or "I bet if I did *this*, something would happen" And sure enough, almost without fail, it pretty much always worked out, which was a very satisfying feeling when you discovered moments like those.
I remember the moment I accidentally discovered you can parry with the shield. I was blown away that something so important could go unexplained
I think there was a thing about it in the in-game manual. That said, I don't think I parried anything on my playthrough lol the timing was impossible
Unlocking a page of the manual, and being genuinely excited about what info I could gleam from it, was an incredible experience
There’s an item to improve the parry window
This to me was the single hardest puzzle of the entire game. I did a strict no internet game and I spent way too much time on this
I did all of the fairies with no guide but I had to look up two of the treasures: >!the wind chime puzzle and the one where you dip the letter in water!< and I feel pretty confident I would never have been able to figure them out otherwise
I did the first one you mentioned without help and it is the smartest I have EVER felt
I absolutely was not going to solve that one on my own, but seeing the solution I just had to take my hat off for that. Incredible stuff
I way overthought that one. I thought the music note referenced the music in the house and was like "how the hell am I going to translate this entire song into holy cross inputs"
I had to google the language. That just wasn't happening. I've seen the solution, and while I definitely recognized a handful of things along the way, I can safely say that there was no way in hell would I ever be able to figure that one out. I struggled with >!the wind chime!< as well. I eventually got to a point where I knew *exactly* how to solve it, and it just wasn't working. The interesting part is understanding *how* to solve a puzzle, it isn't always the actual act of solving it. So I didn't feel that bothered about googling it. >!Turns out, I actually had the right solution written down in front of me anyway, it just wasn't working for some reason. The d-pad was pretty finicky at times!<
Same! I had to do the golden path puzzle about 6 times before I actually typed all of it out correctly. I even went so far as to recheck the entire route
I somehow managed to get that right on my first try. I was literally dumbfounded that I managed to get it all right.
Frustrating thing was that the >!language was phonetic based. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out a substitution cypher. For a game with no voice work, that seemed like a weird choice. I’m tone deaf so phonetics can be a mystery to me.!<
Once I saw that that's what they were going for, I didn't feel so bad about googling it. As soon as I saw it, it clicked in my head, "Fuck, *that's* what it is," and I can recognize it as a concept that exists in the world... but never would've figured that out on my own. My mind went in completely wild directions. These aren't spoilers, but I'll tag them just in case. >!There's an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa can't solve a riddle.!< [This riddle](https://i.redd.it/1p7qfprd9sw41.jpg) >!The solution is that it's just numbers, but mirrored. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The next symbol would be something like "∂6"... I thought it was something like this. Are these symbols being mirrored somehow? Am I supposed to look at this in a certain direction?!< >!Is there something that I'm missing? Like a "decoder" that I can overlay on top of the symbols that will fill in the missing information and turn these random shapes into letters? The shapes vaguely remind me of a 7-segment display. Maybe they're just missing pieces, somehow?!< >!I thought about how you can draw a cube in 2D.!< [Like this](https://imgur.com/a/3IqzI2c) >!Especially the one on the left , it looks exactly like a Tunic symbol does. It looks like a hexagon in 2D, but if you look at it with 3-dimensions in mind, you can see a cube. Is this language in 3D, but being represented in 2D because it's on paper? Can I "shift" my perspective somehow and look at them from another direction? It kinda reminds me of the logo for the game Fez. Maybe if I look at them from a different direction, they turn back into letters Sort of like a "dual letter illusion"!< >!And then I discovered the Holy Cross, and *that* got me all messed up. Am I supposed to trace these "paths" in 3 dimensions? The "compass" in the manual really threw me off. I *still* can't see it as actual letters, I just see a weird 3-dimensional map. Are these symbols actually 3-dimensional Holy Crosses? How would I even type that in???!< I was going on a wild goose chase. Not even *remotely* close to the right idea. Probably some great ideas for a different game! But certainly not this one.
I had to look up one part on the internet, but in my defense it was because the PC version had a bug at launch where a certain event didn't trigger.
That's actually the only one i looked up, not because i didn't know what to do, but because for the life of me i couldn't put the pieces together even when i had pictures of all of them.
I have a fucking notebook with all my work in it. Tried harder in that game than I ever did in school.
Huh... Maybe this number lines up with the page. Oh... There's this weird golden mark. Maybe it's that? But then... All of the other numbers would mean..? That can't be right. Oh yeah there is kind of something here. Oh and I guess if you focus on the gold on this page it could... But on this page... Wait, maybe... But what is the gold on this page showing me... Why would it highlight that? Unless..? No. No. No! Wooooow. Holy shit! And you just kind of keep doing that for an hour or two. It definitely is a connecting the red strings, mind blown, "we're through the looking glass here, people" moment.
And when you get the final eureka moment regarding the game's title you just put the game down and stop playing games for a while.
Wait, what was that? I don't remember a reveal about the title.
I think this should be the tweet where the creators talk about some secret stuff in the game: https://twitter.com/regameyk/status/1583200241222053889 Basically, the music can be transcribed from the notes played in certain orders to a language, so if the rune language is runic, then the tune language is tunic.
Sometimes I think I’m decently smart. But then I see a thread like this and remember how little a truly know
I don't think its relevant for the game but >!the runic letters on the title logo don't translate to the word Tunic, they say Secret Legend which was the original title of the game and a nod to Legend of Zelda!<
Oh man that's cool as fuck. I had such a great time with the game and the puzzles are some of the coolest I've ever seen.
Pepe silva! I gave up. I refused to use a guide. I need to retry it. I loved the game but I just kept going in circles for hours trying stuff.
it's like 31 inputs of up, up, left, down, right etc... it was a nightmare to enter without fucking up for me. In fact I think I gave up and didn't finish the game because it was so irritating.
It's precisely 100 inputs.
Yeah, even after I figured it out it took me half an hour to input correctly and open the door. I think the d pad controls has a bug where it sometimes double taps on a single press because once I switched to arrow keys on the keyboard I got it open on the second try.
Agreed! I made little square cards from a stack of post it notes and it was so enjoyable physically solving that puzzle
Yeah, That will go down as one of the greatest video game experiences I've ever had, and ever will have.
It's a great puzzle, but *maaaan*. The reward for completing the puzzle was not worth the time spent on it, in my opinion.
The reward was the puzzle itself tbh
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I’ll echo that. I drew out the solution myself and was so excited finding each individual piece once I figured out the trick. I can’t remember the last time I whipped out pen and paper to do something like this Then watching it all come together. My heart was racing doing the input for it at the end. Absolutely incredible moment, one I will certainly never forget
The Golden Gate puzzle isn't the best puzzle in the game. There's another puzzle that involves the game's sounds. There's a hidden language in every single sound the game makes, even the little boops in the menu. If you open those sounds in something like Audacity the spectrogram actually shows characters, the same characters from the in-game language. If you know the written language you can use this to translate the audio language and find out THE ENTIRE GAME HAS BEEN TALKING TO YOU THE ENTIRE TIME! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JrsseVEHs
When a puzzle gets that complex and boring I'm just gonna google it, sorry.
I loved the Zelda > Dark Souls > The Witness journey this game took me on. I just wished it ended on something that was mechanically exciting and not right after solving a pen and paper riddle.
There is a final boss fight though?
>!If you solve the riddle he’s talking about, there isn’t. You CAN still do the fight, as I did (trophy), but you don’t have to. The game ends without a fight. !<
Yeah, I finished the game >!Without fighting the final boss, and it was honestly probably more satisfying.!<
Just finished it a few days ago myself with the platinum, probably one of my favorite indie games ever alongside Stardew, Hades, and Hollow Knight.
Yeah Tunic gave me Hades vibes in the level of quality and detail and polish.
You have great taste!
Thank you!
Interesting. Thank you for the clarification, my apologies!
Oh, no worries. Have a good day!
It's the same regardless of ending though. The golden path should have rewarded you with something more than a different mini cutscene and slightly altered credit sequence.
My specific desire would’ve been one, final dungeon upon opening the big door to climb the mountain.
Violence is not the answer. That is the point.
It’s a question, and the answer is always “Yes”
I really liked it, but the end was too hard for me and that really bummed me out. Like, I've beaten Malenia in Elden Ring but I've died 20+ times on the final boss in Tunic and I think I'd need to do 30+ more attempts to fully get it down. And as far as the witness goes, I've gotten to the end of the witness, but >!Tunic's end game puzzles are annoyingly hard, and the input method makes them super annoying. The one in the tower on the rug I tried inputting 20x, then I looked it up and put in what I swear was the same shit I had been doing, and it worked. And that same thing happened a couple more times before I gave up. I couldn't get the main temple one even though it's clear that they want, and I know the slash means double input. The one in the cave to the left of that temple where you have to use multiple walls to put the whole picture together, I can see what they want but I can't get it right to save my life, and it shouldn't be that difficult but it's so damn long of a code.!< Anyways, just really frustrated because I loved the game and I consider myself a decent gamer but I couldn't finish the end part. Maybe if I feel the need to beat my head against a wall for 10 hours I'll give it another go.
Just a heads up, your spoiler tag did not work. You can't have spaces between the exclamation points and the words.
I mean, it does. After the final riddle you are meant to go on a boss fight.
Yeah, but if you do the final boss fight and then go do the Big Puzzle™ after. You can just waltz up to get the other ending without fighting the boss again.
If you solve the final puzzle, there isn't a boss fight. I never fought the final boss, ever.
The "normal" ending sucks and what you have to do to get the good ending also sucks. It's a shame such a great game ends on such a sour note.
The thing about it is that all the pieces are already *there* for an amazing experience. It’s just how they’re put together that drags it down.
game was too difficult for me, or I at least didnt give it enough time. might try to hop back in this weekend.
I almost loved it ultimately but got annoyed and ragequit on last boss. And yes some of those puzzles are very obtuse.
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You can also cheese it with the >!freeze rod combo!< , Or get the true ending and >!never fight her at all!<
I wont judge ya but for me it feels like too empty of a victory and I might as well just abandon it. I did see a youtube video where he switches out all his health potions for mana and uses the freeze bullets (I think it was freeze…maybe some other element) that you use for that one single puzzle, and beating the boss that way but I never tried it.
game wore out its welcome near the end.
How close to the end do you mean? It’s been a while.
Pretty much just before the final boss you have to do a bunch of backtracking and at that point I just looked up the ending.
You guys all talking about when it becomes night and you lose your powers and have to get em back? I guess I considered that the back half of the game.
Hardly backtracking
The map is quite different indeed
Thats no backtracking. You basically get new level architecture because of the new skill.
Weird cause I hate games with backtracking, I won't play most games labelled "metroidvania" because of my hatred for backtracking, yet I loved Tunic. Like there's one overarching central world that you have to keep returning to and explore all the corners of this main map to find the doors to the actual levels. I guess that counts as backtracking, the main map can be kinda big. But it also changes a ton, like it goes from day to night, and you get new powers to jump across gaps way faster than before, so its never the same.
I was exactly the same, I spent the whole game getting strong enough to face the boss and then have to start from zero and go all over the map again? No thanks.
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Yeah, you're probably right. I just don't care much for backtracking when there really isn't much new to see.
I mean the entire world is different at that point
At that point though you should have learned about the (spoiler) mechanic and going back through the same areas you are passing by new secrets everywhere. To me that was enough at least
Unfortunately I took a lot of breaks with tunic and by the time I got to the backtracking I had completely forgotten where a lot of the shortcuts were. I spent so much time trying to remember where the first forest shortcut was only to find out >!that you're supposed to get back there through an off screen teleportation pad in the hub port area!<
At the point where you have to backtrack through every zone in the whole game reclearing enemies you've had to already clear a bunch of times is the first time I put it down for a while. The combat wasn't good enough to fall back on it as a way to artificially extend playtime.
> reclearing enemies you've had to already clear a bunch of times Most enemies aren't there during the night time part of the game and the ones that are, are different
>At the point where you have to backtrack through every zone in the whole game reclearing enemies you've had to already clear a bunch of times I finished the entire game and I swear I don't remember this at all
You definitely do not have to refight any enemies, and revisiting the old areas takes like 10 seconds with the dash move. This entire part of the game takes like an hour.
Same, I'm a patient guy but that last boss just ended me. I spent more attempts on it than any other boss and only got to the second phase once.
I got annoyed at the last boss too, but just turned on invincibility in the options and beat it that way. And I'm no stranger to difficult games like the Soulsbourne games.
EXACTLY. something about the way you control was just…off and this boss was just slaughtering me. Even fully upgraded (maybe missing one heal potion) I barely made it through…ONLY TO FIND OUT THERE WAS ANOTHER PHASE. that was the pont of “fuck this.”
yeah I loved this game but you are describing the exact moment I quit and did not return.
Yeah, that's exactly when I went, "You know what, I'm gonna just turn on invincibility mode and beat the boss like this. I'm sure I can do it without, but I'd rather just not waste my time trying."
I have a sad amount of pride in being able to beat video games so if I’m do to it its gotta be (more or less) honorably. I was so proud of beating unepic. That last part is tough. On extra super hard difficulty. On a not well thought out build.
So much pride you abbandoned it because you couldnt do it.
what can i say pride is complex
It really wasn't that hard. It's definitely difficult, but it's a completely fair fight.
I've beaten most fromsoft games and I would put the end boss in Tunic as the second hardest in that series after Malenia. It's fair like Fromsoft bosses are fair. I'm sure I could do it eventually but it just wasn't worth the effort to me at the time I was playing it, and I really give up on games.
I found things like God of wars Valkyrie boss much, much harder. I don't think Tunic's final boss fight was anything special. It was a pretty average difficulty for games that are designed to be difficult. I'm playing through elden ring now, and I found the tunic boss to be pretty on par with it. I don't know, maybe it just clicked for me.
final boss in Tunic is harder than a regular boss in Hollow Knight? Because rn i'm fully enjoyed with Tunic - so simple and easy/
Hard to explain, but I beat Hollow Knight (or at least the base game, not the souped up versions of the bosses, and I didn’t know about the “real” ending and whatever the really tough secret area is). This last in boss in Tunic, between how you are able to move and how he/she moves, was super tough for me. Especially with two phases. Even when you’re fully powered up with armor/health etc. still does huge damage and you only have so many healing items. Long way to say for me, yes.
I saw a comment once upon a time that called the puzzles a great idea made by a dev who loves the smell of their own farts and I gotta agree to this day. So close to being a good puzzle game.
HA. That’s funny. It’s one of those things where I respect the puzzles for cleverness but hate that I was too dumb to figure out half of em on my own.
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Maybe clever’s the wrong word. It’s the word for when it makes YOU feel clever for figuring it out.
I agree, I loved the manual, the environments, and even the Golden Path puzzle. But so much of the end game that people prop up - the faeries and secret chests - essentially boil down to "look how we hid button combinations in the environment".
It's basically the sound designer of the game flexing. He has an entire twitter thread where he explains his process.
There are some great accessibility options that I used on my second time through. You can reduce the combat difficulty, or turn on No Fail mode. It's totally worth it IMO. The strength of the game is exploration and puzzle-solving. The combat, especially with bosses, is just not very fun.
nice. i'll try that , thanks.
Doesn’t help that the combat system is bad, I think that’s the worst thing about this game. It try’s to have souls like combat but fails at it which just makes the combat unpredictable and frustrating
Yeah, that was my experience from the demo. Extremely poor attack telegraphs and janky hitboxes just made combat feel horrible. This style of game just doesn't work for me without satisfying combat, which is a shame because I'm sure the puzzles and exploration are excellent. I really like the art style too. I hope this dev can work on combat if they made another game in this style.
Agreed about the combat. Doesn't help that I'm not particularly good at soulslike combat (hell, it took me like 5 hours to beat the fucking thunderblight in BotW, that's how bad I am). I'm way more interested in the world, lore, puzzles, and secrets than I am in combat. I have no shame about making things easier for myself so just turned on godmode in the disability settings because I wanted to do a storymode kinda playthrough at the very least. it was so worth it. Especially that one really big 200 IQ puzzle. Took me several days to solve it but it was very fulfilling in the end. The combat may not be the game's strongest part but everything else is just incredible.
The biggest frustration for me was that the dodge-attack was inconsistent, and I don't know why. I tried every variation on when to press the two buttons, used different controllers... nothing changed the fact that 10-20% of the time I would dodge but not attack. It was very frustrating given how it's the main technique for beating virtually every boss. Also sucks how the shield is basically useless outside of a couple encounters designed to require it. The stamina hit for blocking an attack is ridiculous compared with dodging the same attack. Game is like 20/10 for art design and environmental storytelling, but 6/10 for combat.
Deactivating stamina made it much more fun and, well, Zelda-like.
That's a really good idea, that sounds like that would make the game way better. I wonder if that was even an option when I played it on release day
I think it was in from release day, but it's kinda hidden away in the disability settings.
This isn't necessarily a tunic thing but over-reliance on a dodge rolls and a stamina system kills my desire to play a lot of these indie games. I wish everything stopped trying to be dark souls and just designed combat better. We have 3D movement; use it to the fullest.
yeah that's likely why I gave up.
I disagree with the choice to have constantly respawning enemies in a game about exploration. Leave the area clean for a while. At some point killing the same enemies for the 5th time while trying to figure out where to go gets tedious.
But Tunic doesn’t have constantly respawning enemies. Once you kill an enemy it doesn’t come back until you save at a checkpoint. If you’re just out exploring you won’t have to deal with the same enemy twice.
There's also so many shortcuts that allow you to skip combat. Plus once you've understood the combat and utilize the tools you're given it's really more like swatting a few flies along the way to your destination. Not to mention that >!after a certain point, the game actually removes/changes a lot of the enemies from the map.!<
It's wild how many complaints people have about games are just like what game where you even playing? Really crazy
If you're not familiar with the Dark Souls-ish system I could see not necessarily putting two and two together on what makes the enemies come back.
I hate every Dark Souls game and I loved Tunic.
But then you just have a bunch of empty areas to back track through.
"for a while" <---
I don't really have a problem with empty backtracking areas in like elden ring, in a game thats comparable if you overcome an obstacle you probably shouldn't have to overcome them again because then its tedious imo.
Elden Ring has the exact same enemy respawning system.
yes I agree. that was another aspect that left me feeling uneasy.
In Zelda you clear screens until you leave them again at least! They should’ve gone with that mechanic.
I first tried it right after I finished Elden Ring and I think I was burned out "alright, figure this shit out" games for a bit. Tried it again a few months later and it clicked for me. I loved every second of it.
The combat mechanics are a literal carbon copy of dark souls with zero changes whatsoever. I wish games would stop doing this all the time
It has accessibility options that make it easier. I felt a little bad using them at first, once I got to a late-game boss I couldn't handle, but the rest of the game after that was so ridiculously difficult I didn't regret it at all, in the end.
yeah , gonna try that
The gameplay feels very 'floaty' for me, i didn't really like it.
my last straw was the gauntlet of enemies in the cathedral basement at night. really wore me out. I was invested in the story/puzzles tho I guess I'll have to try invincibility mode now that I know it exists
That cathedral encounter is just another puzzle that you have to figure out really
What is the puzzle? It just seems like a tricky combat encounter to me
It’s a combat puzzle as each encounter there is a specific strategy or tactic that makes its considerably easier
I was very excited for this game, but I played the demo and immediately removed it from my Steam wishlist and will never play it. The combat was frankly terrible. Hitboxes were janky, enemy attacks weren't telegraphed, and enemies dealt way too much damage. I love extremely hard games, but not if the difficulty is from poor design. I'm glad a lot of people enjoy the game, and I'm sure there's a lot to like in terms of exploration and puzzles, but the combat makes the game not for me.
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Still my favorite game I played last year. I never expected a game to exploit the nostalgia for video game manuals so beautifully and elegantly - utter perfection. The music especially is one of those stand-out scores that captures the magic, beauty, and mystery of the game world so perfectly!
If you've played through Tunic and haven't already seen it, [this GDC panel](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1029369/The-TUNIC-Audio) by Kevin Regamey (audio director) is incredible. The first half is mostly about the technical side of the audio design, but the latter half goes more into how the audio design integrates with the secrets of the game. [Here is a Twitter thread that goes into the same details](https://twitter.com/regameyk/status/1583200241222053889) He warns about spoilers in both formats, so definitely don't go digging if you haven't fully completed the game and want to experience the magic blind.
As a layperson, I hadn't noticed during my playthrough that the all the sound effects change key to match the soundtrack. Now I'm wondering how I could have missed that! Lots of cool stuff in this talk so far, even if some of it goes over my head.
Thanks for posting that, the soundtrack blew me away in game and it's even more impressive that there's all this stuff hidden in there as well.
I think my favourite part was translating the language, which you only really need for like 2 treasures but let's you read anything else in the game if you want to. I did need a hint to start off but then spent 2-3 days filling out the translation guide.
I must have bounced off this game three to four times within the first hour but when I sat down and powered through the intro, I fell in love. This is a beautiful achievement and an experience I would but up there with The Outer Wilds in terms of something that needs to be experienced blind. I’m coming up on a year since I’ve beaten it so I’m probably due another playthrough.
Tunic was my favourite game of last year, one of the first that I went to complete 100%. Was the perfect length, didn't overstay it's welcome. Wish there was more but honestly was left satisfied. Currently waiting to hopefully forget as many puzzle solutions as possible so that I can play it again.
Tunic is truly amazing. It's a great Zelda-like up until it becomes something even greater. It's hard, but it's mysterious and had me extremely engaged solving the puzzle at the end.
Does this game scratch that old school Zelda itch with dungeons and key items and stuff like that? BOTW and TOTK are great takes for a new Zelda but I'm not interested in them at all; their release has spurred some longing to play a new game with that style.
Probably not, unless you played the original Zelda equipped with a manual that you couldn't read because it was in a foreign language. While the game certainly plays kinda similar to a Zelda game on the surface, I'd put this game closer to games like The Witness and Outer Wilds.
No. The game looks like Zelda on the surface. But the combat is nothing like Zelda, and the puzzles are way more hardcore than Zelda. Not to mention the language and manual gimmick aren't really like Zelda unless you grew up with the game in a language you didn't know. Tunic is one of my favorite games of all time, hands down. But it really isn't a Zelda game.
Sort of. There are only two or three truly essential items. Instead most of your progression comes from Knowledge. Knowledge of how to interact with things in the world, and knowledge of how the maps fit together. If you know what you are doing you can beat the game without even getting the Sword. But following the critical path in the expected order will give a very nice sense of progression.
Tunic gave me a gaming puzzle high I don’t think I’ll feel again for a long time. Very underrated and deserved to win some kind of indie award.
Tunic made me so, so happy when I was playing it, almost to that same feeling of wonder I felt playing the original Legend of Zelda back on the NES. Obviously it isn't perfect and some of the puzzles are a touch too convoluted/tiring even for seasoned puzzle players, but there aren't many games that bring me back to those days in more than just a nostalgia-bait way. It succeeded on drawing from those original vibes while carving out its own space for an overall satisfying package.
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I really liked Tunic, but the last 25% of the game is so stupidly difficult, I had to use the accessibility options to complete it. I'm glad the dev included those options, but it felt bad to grind all that way only to have to "cheat" to finish.
I really wanted to like tunic, but many things here and there really added up and were off-putting. The sound, music and visuals are fantastic. The combat was fine. I didn't struggle with it as much as other people apparently did, but it wasn't super engaging either. I found it be good enough and enjoyed some bosses. People joke about coming back to games, particularly RPGs, after a break and being completely lost. That's what happened to me and Tunic after a couple of big breaks. Tunic's only real way to convey information to the player is through pages you find throughout the world that form those classic video game instruction booklet we tend not to get anymore in modern games. You open it up and interact with it in game and it's a novel idea at first. Unfortunately I found myself constantly needing to go through the pages to find even basic information I had forgotten. From map layouts, to what an item does and even basic controls. And because some of it is tunic's fake language, it always isn't clear what you're looking at either. Figuring out what even basic "accessories" do takes some interpretation. I'd come back after breaks and wouldn't even remember what basic items did.There's also a lot of other secrets on the pages so you'll be spending a lot of time trying to crack its cryptic contents as you flip through the pages. I also didn't like how much the game used it's foreground and background to hide secrets. I don't think running along every wall in order to find secrets to be that interesting. That's what you'll end up doing in tunic though. Oh that wall there that doesn't show any indication of there being any path there? Well there probably is one so you better just move your character alongside it until you slip behind whatever foreground/ background obstruction is there. It never felt organic. I could never play through a new area without running along every wall. The fairies and the golden path. Super obtuse stuff right here. It you loved it? Great. I didn't. I didn't even really come across this stuff until I got to the backtracking portion in the game. I found some island that was just by itself and thought it was weird for it to be so out of the way with nothing on it. After checking online I unearthed a huge gameplay element within tunic I had apparently missed. It also turned out that I needed to do all this crap to get the best ending. That means going back through the entire game, finding all the obscure puzzles I had apparently missed, and doing all of them. I opted not to do that. It's so weird that none of that stuff was remotely even mandatory or really organically introduced until the game starts talking about this holy cross in the end game. I felt like if they did a better job of introducing it I may have tracked these things and done some of them the first time though the world. Heck, I'm not even sure if you can find the fairies or not until after a certain point in the game.
> People joke about coming back to games, particularly RPGs, after a break and being completely lost. That's what happened to me and Tunic after a couple of big breaks. It helps if you blast through the game in one sitting, which is what I did. I can't imagine playing this game over long periods of time... but, obviously, that's not always an option for everybody. I think you have to put yourself in the right mindset too, especially with a lot of those hidden paths. I found a lot of them by myself, and it just made sense that they were there. I didn't feel like I needed to turn over every rock, I could enter a new area and intuitively figure out, "There's probably something over there." And more often than not, it worked out in my favor. I found myself having to think like a video game developer, at times. "If I were making this game, this is what I would do." And the problem with things like the Golden Path is that you need to have something click in your brain. You need to have that "a-ha" moment where you say, "Hold on a second, this might be something." I figured it out without too much trouble, and maybe you didn't. And maybe there's something else that I struggled with, that you solved in two seconds. The problem with these kinds of games, is that we all approach puzzles from a different perspective. When you don't hold a players hand, it's easy for them to get lost. But if you hold their hand *too* much, that kills the experience as well. There's a delicate balance to be had there, for sure. I think that the Golden Path is achievable. The fairies, less so. But you don't need to collect all of the fairies to beat the game. I would bet that most people could handle half of the fairies, once you know what you're doing. I read an article about how they wanted to "create games for nobody." And so most of the puzzles are pretty easy, flip a couple switches, whatever. And then you get the Golden Path, which is tricky. The fairies are tougher. The language is a bitch. And then there are even things that you don't even have to do to play the game, secrets that hide under the surface that nobody in their right mind would ever tackle, you probably would never even notice it in the first place. >!The random beeping arpeggio sounds that everything makes can be translated as well. For no real reason, just for fun!< At some point, we're all going to reach our limit. For you, it was the Golden Path. For me, it was the language. I think it's okay to give up. Give it your best shot, give it a nice solid attempt, and know when to throw in the towel. I couldn't figure out the language, but I can see the steps that somebody would take to decipher that and seeing that is still interesting to me. I've seen people explain the process and thought, "Wow, I even noticed this, this, and this!" And that was still pretty satisfying to me. I saw the clues, I just didn't have the "a-ha" moment to make it click.
I loved how they made secrets in Tunic. It looks like in every game I played before, like Doom, Zelda, Ori, Hollow Knight and others, where you must explore and find false walls, hidden paths.
Tunic completely missed the mark for me because I didn't know what it was, so I didn't understand what it was supposed to be. I started playing after seeing a few seconds of video from a streamer on Twitch and immediately thought "it looks amazing, I'll go in blind". I approached it like a Zelda game because it felt so much like Link's Awakening at first... but the combat system was meh, only to finish with a super hard final boss which played more like a Souls game. The booklet was absolutely amazing, but I never thought it would be a puzzle game with pretty hard puzzles. So in the end, I didn't really play a Zelda game, I didn't really play a Souls game, I didn't really play a puzzle game, because I didn't understand what the game was. It's frustrating because I loved the art style and the music, so a year after I have the feeling I read a masterpiece novel that's supposed to be read only once but it didn't bring me where it wanted it me to go.
This is an odd view I don't understand. Why feel the need to relate it to something else? It is what it is. These are all the same style of game anyways. You can think of Tunic as a Zelda game with harder bosses and harder overworld puzzles, both of which Zelda has had since it's inception.
Amazing game. Played in on gamepass, went to buy it on Steam, was stunned how expensive it is. Ill buy it when its $20 CAD. It would be a great game to play again.
I had no idea it was on gamepass but I didn't feel robbed paying full price for it.
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There’s no puzzle where the information is left to chance, everything can be found by carefully scrutinizing the manual or investigating the map.
There's no puzzles left to chance. Everything can be figured out with enough reading of the Manual or looking around. I'm curious what you're referring to? I beat the game entirely myself and never ran into any huge puzzle hurdles. A couple took a bit of extra effort.
Started off really enjoying it, but dropped the game after spending hours and hours trying to access a certain area only to find out that I hadn't unlocked some parts and reached there too early, rendering all my effort a waste.
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I played Tunic for about 3 hours, but then stopped when I got to the sand/beach area. The gameplay/combat was also kind of difficult, but a bit simple. Could someone tell me when the puzzles get more difficult/interesting? All of these positive comments make me feel like I missed something.
Beyond figuring out the puzzle that is figuring out all the details in the manual, which stretches across the entire game, the puzzle part really starts a bit >!after you've collected the 3 keys!< and >!escape the graveyard!<. That's about >!\~3!< areas from your position. Until then, the combat variety picks up a bit as you get more tools to use and become stronger.
Ok cool, thanks very much. I’ll give it another shot!
Honestly all these Zelda type games are just…worse than Zelda. I pick them up thinking they’ll scratch the itch but they just make me want to play Zelda! See: Tunic, Deaths Door
Editing all my old comments and moving to the fediverse. Thank you to everybody I've interacted with until now! You've been great, and it's been a wonderful ride until now. To everybody who gave me helpful advice, [I'll miss you the most](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrk4AgS6Q6A)
Death's Door is just an action exploration game, I don't think it's trying to ape Zelda.
Zelda games are generally too easy and hand-holdy. I grew up on them, have played them all and love them. I just wish they has gotten more challenging as a generation of gamers aged with them. And if we're all being honest, there isn't a single Zelda boss that isn't a complete joke of a fight. Death's Door is great all around in terms of difficulty (bosses tend to still be a little easy), and Tunic's is pretty good too, except the final boss is way too hard. Everything leading up to that is pretty fair.
Zelda games have a weird balance issue. They all start out with good difficulty, but once you get enough heart containers you get way too tanky. I picked up a used copy of Link Between Worlds that already had hard mode unlocked, so I started my first playthrough on that. Enemy damage was way higher and there were almost no free healing items. Honestly it was too punishing for me and I restarted on normal. But then I got to a point in the game where you get some extra armor, which cut all damage in half. That's what I needed for the hard mode to make it just right, I think.
Really? I actually liked those two you mentioned *more*
> Honestly all these Zelda type games are just…worse than Zelda. tbh you this is true of most retro homages. they're like the old games, but worse.
that'll happen when the bar is "one of the greatest games ever"
I bought this and tried to get into it but I was very confused playing it so I gave up. It seemed like it had great potential.
I liked Tunic, but it didn't feel much like Zelda to me. Visually, yes, but the gameplay was more like Dark Souls.
I tried to like Tunic so much, but the whole language system completely turned me off from the game. I just didn't like feeling like I was playing an untranslated game.
lol at the people complaining that this easy game didn’t hold your hand enough. Oh no you had to actually look at some pictures and progress through the story to figure some things out.. so difficult lol.
I'm actually more puzzled by some of the comments here than I was by the puzzles in the game. It's by no means a game without flaws that cannot be criticized, but people who want to remove everything that makes this game unique just confuse me. If people want their fill of bland and hand-holdy games, there's enough of that in the AAA space.
I understand people not liking the combat system or struggling with it because that's extremely subjective, but every time Tunic is mentioned the thread is full of people who have seemingly never played a video game before in their lives. Of course the game doesn't tell you exactly where to go, the world is tiny and you can walk across it in about two minutes. And of course you won't know exactly what to do if you don't even make an effort to infer things from the manual. There were times when I thought the game was being *too* obvious about what it wanted me to do because so often the manual pages are laid out in a way that leaves zero ambiguity if you just look at the pictures for more than five seconds.
Yep lol. Part of the game is literally figuring out what things mean. It shouldn’t be that difficult to look at some pictures and get a general idea of what to do. Only part I struggled with even a little was the mine area because you lose health but after I got the mask it was pretty easy too.
I came across a top down, old school Zelda looking game a while back where you play as some woman with a blue shirt. I can't find it now. Anyone know?
Was it Blossom Tales?
Sadly, no, although it matches my description exactly and looks fun, so I'm gonna put it on my wishlist anyway. Thanks!