TUNIC Reviews
I did so, and it did not live up to the high bar expectations set for me by the gaming community.
The game is a beautifully detailed world with lots of little areas containing puzzles and different enemies to defeat. You start off as some fox creature, waking up on a beach in a strange land. You must explore the surrounding area to find your first weapon and beat back the baddies while you uncover the mystery of what's going on.
You'll quickly discover that, true to hype, it's a Zeldavania, with powers and abilities that you find that help you unlock each new area and get to secrets in dungeons you've already cleared. There's quite a bit of back-and-forth across this relatively small map, and a lot of taking side and hidden tracks that are just off of main areas. You can fast-travel at shrines you've discovered, but this is of limited utility until the end game when it's easier to zip over barriers and get to the nearest shrine. So it's just a matter of finding your way through and getting to the end.
Only, the game doesn't tell you what to do. Or much of anything, really. Ultimately, TUNIC ends up being the real-time action swordplay survival version of the card game Mao. The only rule you're allowed to know up-front is this one. The rest, you must figure out for yourself.
For example, the interaction dialogs that pop up when you reach targets are in the world's native language, which is unreadable unless you're a linguist with the skills to decode ancient-looking text. Otherwise, you literally have to guess which option to choose (there are strong hints, but that's beside the point). You will occasionally stumble across pieces of an "instruction book" (one achievement is for collecting all the scattered pages). However, 90% of these pages are written in that language.
There are pictures in the instruction manual, and a page with the control scheme on it. There are also some hand-drawn doodles in the margins, as well as in the "notes" section that used to show up at the end of old physical manuals, ostensibly left there by the previous owner as they figured things out. You find figure out later who that might be.
These hints are all you get throughout the game to help you on your way. The rest is up to your inductive and deductive reasoning skills. At first, this is refreshing. There's no heavy-handed exposition and world-building intro cutscene. There's no opening tutorial that repeatedly interrupts you to tell you to keep doing what you're doing. You're really left to explore and figure out things largely on your own.
However, the language barrier and near-complete lack of guidance got old for me as I soon had absolutely no clue what to do next after thinking I'd explored everything, but hadn't yet stumbled on the right page of the instruction book to nudge me in the right direction.
Running back and forth, I found that combat isn't as clean as I would like. There's no dodge cancellation, and the fox's sword swings are pretty slow and VERY short range. You can find a shield at some point, getting to which is a VERY hidden secret in the middle of the first area of the game. Once equipped, it takes the fox an excruciatingly long time to raise his shield, which makes it less useful in the game's fast-paced combat. Enemy attacks are extremely quick, and you can't just block them as the fox often doesn't raise his shield fast enough. You have to already be blocking when the attack starts. You can charge a "shield counter", but it's very slow and timing it to interrupt enemies' lightning-fast strikes (a critical part of fighting certain ones) is a huge PITA. At least it was for me.
One very annoying enemy is this bird-like critter that divebombs you and then immediately and quickly moves back out of range. You can draw them in with a magic orb weapon (there's an achievement for collecting all the magic weapons!) that acts like a hookshot, but each shot takes more mana than you get back from beating them. And even at max power you can't land enough hits on them to kill them before they move back out of range, meaning multiple non-refilling orb shots. The shield is fairly useless against them since it takes longer to charge up a counter strike than it takes the eagle-like things to swoop all the way across the screen and hit you. There's also no indication that they're readying an attack, making timing anything pretty hard. This made the areas of the game with these creatures very frustrating for me.
Unlike many other games in this genre, TUNIC features no combat challenges outside of boss battles. There are no other areas where you're locked into an arena wherein you must wipe out all enemies to progress. There are no achievements for monsters killed. There's no experience grind for leveling, nor any stat tracker for combat victories. You can safely run past most enemies in most areas, and indeed many walkthrough videos show the player doing just this. Enemies may follow you through some scene transitions, though, but never into new regions. So you might ask yourself why combat is an issue.
For completionists, that would be money. Combat is the best and most effective way to grind out the little diamond sparkly things that count as the game's currency. You need lots of these. Between having to spend 999 a pop to buy the 2 gold coins available in shops (there's an achievement for collecting them all!) and the tier-stacking costs of making stat boost sacrifices (you need at least one for an achievement), you need quite a bit of money if you want to prepare for the final battle. Much, much more than can be looted from the game's many chests. You certainly need at least 1998 for the gold coins plus about 150~300 for any one of the sacrifices, since powering up all the way may not be much of an issue.
TUNIC has a "no-fail" mode that doesn't disable achievements. I think this ruined the game a bit for me, as I got tired of the poor combat mechanics very quickly. I turned this on and rapidly plowed through the rest of the game. I ended up beating the penultimate "final boss" of the pre-end game before ever even making my first power-up "sacrifice" because I hadn't gotten that instruction manual page yet. I just chipped away at his health, exasperated at how weakly I was hitting him, and wondering how any human possibly could have made it through any boss fight without turning on the no-fail mode.
And then I found the instruction page that "explained" how to power up the fox with sacrifices. And then he got pretty powerful (comparatively). A bit late, but it made mopping up the post-game achievements considerably easier. Running back-and-forth collecting secrets and beating up enemies with end-game strength is always satisfying to a completionist.
Only some secrets are magicked away and require using the d-pad to enter a "code" that opens a door or reveals some invisible item. There are usually designs hidden nearby that tell you the code, once you finally figure out how to decipher the "hint" (again, an instruction manual page buried deep in the game). There's no feedback that you're putting in the code correctly, other than that when you think you're done, the door just won't open or any item reveal itself. And some of these codes are exceptionally obnoxious and have been described as "the stupidest code I've ever seen in my life" by various users in online forums. I agree wholeheartedly. They start off at "dumb", and then steadily progress beyond the ability of the English language to explain just how exceedingly stupid they are. The devs definitely let this part of the game get way out of hand, and I felt that it takes quite a bit away from the gameplay.
TUNIC is a thankfully short game. It took me just over 13 hours to complete, even with a lot of extra time spent early-on running back and forth and scratching my head. All said, I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would, but it's not a bad game. I just don't think it's a "GOTY" contender by any means. It simply didn't live up to a reputation that had been building for years before I finally played it.
3.5
