Good Game Design - TUNIC: Secrets Within Secrets
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
- Tunic is a one of a kind experience, but probably not for the reason you think. Let's talk about how it hides its secrets underneath the adventure gameplay.
Noclip Developer Breakdown - Tunic: • The Design Evolution o...
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I‘ve never played a game that handles mystery through its mechanics the way Tunic does. Understanding the Holy Cross, deciphering the script, finding the Golden Path… Being able to go deeper and deeper and having revelation after revelation activates something deep and primal in my brain I can‘t put into words, it‘s so exhilarating and satisfying.
I almost regret that i played tunic, only because it has left a hole in my heart that I've yet to fill.
TUNIC was one of the most unique, engrossing, and satisfying gaming experiences I've ever had, and I have recommended it countless times since.
Outer Wilds is very much the same for leaving a hole. As mentioned briefly in the video, it's another knowledge based puzzle progression. Usually I recommend tunic as a follow up to that game, but the reverse should hold true too.
Go play outer wilds if you haven't yet. (Different from outer worlds lol)
@Scarecrowexe While trying to fill that TUNIC shaped hole, I did download and play the Outer Wilds, but the forced time loop mechanic was too much of an inconvenience for me.
Even though I put up with it for quite a while and progressed through much of the game, it eventually became too much for me.
The game that came pretty close to filling that hole is a little game called "One Shot" which I highly recommend.
The most fun thing about Tunic is realizing that easily about 75% of the game is open to you right from the start. One of the most common questions from people who recently began playing the randomizer mod for the game is "Wait you can get there? How?" or the many questions about chests that have always been there that they never would have noticed. But the game always provides a way to know: It's subtle, but your character will look at nearby unopened chests!
Then you dig even further down into it and find out that there's a SECOND in-game language you encounter many times, from the moment you started up the game right until the end! Even the trailers have phrases of this language in them!
What is the actual hint that Tune-ic exists? I have heard of it and read breakdowns of how it works, but I have no idea how I'd have discovered it myself
EDIT: ha, i JUST noticed who i'm replying to. hi!
@@rickwoods5274 Well hi!
To answer your question, I believe it was something that people stumbled upon after decoding the glyph tower as asked by the manual on page 54. Taking the spectrograph of the audio track on the web page it leads to reveals Truenic on the lower frequency bands (10-500hz) and note progressions on the higher frequency bands. This leads to its discovery in other audio tracks and provided more Truenic-to-Tuneic translations. Then it was just about translating a few lines wherever it was found (mostly fairies) and filling in gaps with what makes sense. FuryForged made a video called "The Tunic Glyph Tower ARG" that shows some examples and explains the early beginnings!
@@ekkosangen holy shit
The very moment I realized how Golden Path works I was literally deniyng it for a minute or so. The idea that all this piecies was scattered throughtout the whole manual all this time looking just like decorative elements are actually a key to the very last, final, sublime puzzle was way too bizarre.
And the way it's done
-Some golden lines on minor drawing?
-What?
-Yellow halo on some of the squares?
-You're kidding, right?
-Coffee stains?
-Oh c'mon!
But when after couple of hours I was looking at that door, tapping that hillariously long cipher with trembling fingers and it actually opened... That was THE BEST feelling I have EVER experienced playing a game.
That feelling that I myself decoded this actually huge cipher using only my brain, intellect and logic. Finding all of those breadcrumbs in a right place and then assembling it in a right way. It was like in those adventure movies where protagonist finds some old relic, then flys to the jungles, goes to an old temple, figures out how to start an ancient mechanism and finally finds treasure. I was feeling like I'm a hero, who cracked the code only few on a planet can. And it actually is in a certain way.
Yeah. This game is one of those things that you can not explain. You can only feel it.
Tunic really invokes the feeling of having to discover things on your own through nothing more than context clues, which I enjoyed having to figure out on my own. Its like a Metroidvania where your progression isn't locked behind what you have,but rather by what you know.
My aha moment: there's a weather vane compass early on, before the East forest. It's in the games native language and had the same four symbols repeated in different variations.
I later found the page detailing another area, and saw the same four symbols again repeated. Already suspecting compass directions but now with a map to relate the symbols to the correct cardinal directions, I was able to translate my first symbols and thought back to that weather vane to get my first Holy Cross interaction.
It's an early hint for both that gets overlooked by most for being the third or so sign in the language that "it's just too early to understand" and so ppl don't look so closely
How the hell was I ever supposed to find the golden path??? Now I'm exhausted AND pissed off.
Tunic really is something else, man
So I saw this video came out and immediately bought Tunic without watching, because I know we have a similar taste in games. And boy you were right. I just spent two evenings pondering how the secret language works and it was sooo satisfying once it clicked. Over the next day I slowly translated words and little by little by context slowly uncovered more and more meanings to the symbols. To the point that I now don't even need my hand written reference to read it. Now I found every fairy and unlocked the true ending, I was ready to watch your video.
I was in for some Zelda action, but this game was so much more, thanks for featuring it.
I had to use guides to find some of the more obscure secrets (like accessing the true ending) but all in all this game is wonderful. I typically don’t enjoy this sort of game on a second go around because finding the secrets is more fun than knowing them. My way around this is to wait several months (sometimes over a year) after beating a game so I forget most of the solutions and item locations and I can figure stuff out all over again. I played Tunic around New Year’s so I’m probably okay to replay it now
Tunic immediately became one of my favorite gaming experiences. It was constantly surprising and discovering the solution to the golden path is one of the greatest moments.
Hard to cover a game like this in a neat and concise way but you nailed it 🔥
I’ve been putting off watching this video until I played tunic and WOW this game. One of my biggest ‘no way’ moment was, like you, when I understood where the golden path was hidden. The other one was when I discovered the hidden path to the mountain door, coming up from the quarry. I was FLABERGASTED because I had previously trekked all the way up the normal path, doing the usual ‘walking along the walls to see if there’s a secret’ but didn’t do it near the door and got stuck so I just went away… and OF COURSE that was where the hidden path was lmao
That damn quarry shortcut! It was there the whole time and yet I didn't see it! All the isometric shortcuts were amazing.
Man what a phenomenal game. My only complaint is how short it is. My favorite part, other than deciphering the in game manual, has to be the combat trial at the bottom of the Cathedral.
Excellent video format for a really-difficult-to-discuss game! Thanks for spotlighting this masterpiece
My moment was that I didn’t understand what the holy cross was, even after getting the page and unlocking the door right next to me (even though it spells it out pretty well for you) but I went to the golden plaque on the mountain side, and out of pure curiosity, decided to follow the lines, and when it worked, I actually screamed
You forgot about the fourth category of person, the "I have so many games and have been so busy outside of that, even if I could, I don't have the time to commit to a new game, but could probably visit it in five or ten years", where it's not a problem because I promise by the time I beat those games I'll have forgotten everything in this video except "aye it's a neat game".
Snoman, have you heard of a game called Void Stranger? It's a puzzle game that just recently came out and it reminds me a lot of the puzzles in Tunic, but with a narrative kinda like Undertale. It's probably my favourite puzzle game of all time now even if I haven't finished it yet! Highly recommended for you!
The waterfall and windmill short cuts were real satisfying and eye opening for me too but the holy cross realization was such a face-palm moment. I'm a couple years too young to have drawn my own map of metroid and don't have huge nostalgia for the nes/snes era. In other words I didn't learn video games on a d-pad and still use it very rarely. I absolutely love video games but and liked Tunic a lot but having the holy cross refer too the d-pad is such hyperbole in my eyes. Sure raises a lot of meta questions about the games narrative that I haven't really seen thoroughly discussed.
Other amazing a-ha moments include:
* Finding the hidden path in the first castle town in Dragon Warrior that leads to a secret area.
* The Psycho Mantis fight in Metal Gear Solid.
* Fez
I guess I'm a sucker for puzzles in games and discovering secrets.
More of a "WOW" moment: Learning my character's real name, and reading the full title of the game itself!
It took me 50 hours to decipher / learn the language and I had a full table of notes and translations by the end!
Funny thing; in 1996, when I created custom Doom1 episodes (18+ designs), I was lambasted, mocked, and cajoled for placing secrets within secret areas. None of the secrets were required to reach the exit to each map; they were meant to offer some additional challenges for completionists. Beyond that, there were ALWAYS hints regarding secrets. Slightly mal-aligned wall textures, different lighting values, or even more obvious clues. More often than not, people's ADD-style running around caused them not only to miss secrets, but some straight-up obvious things. I remember watching one person attempting to play through one of my maps, and they INSISTED that there was a bad design bug because they fell in a hole (shaped like an Ankh). The switch to raise that floor was out in the open and stuck out like a sore thumb (silver switch against brown walls), but it was just above, on a cliff's edge. The map was titled "Ankh Cliffs". 🙄 It wasn't necessary to flip the switch in order to reach the exit, either. 🙄
#MoronsAreCommon
that door at the top of the tower, and discovering each page had a line on it blue my mind!
A ton of the secrets in the game just had me saying, "Clever. If only I were more curious the answer would have never needed to be told to me."
Tunic is everything I like in gaming, roled into one. I was keeping my eye on its development since I heard Lifeformed from Dustforce was in charge of the OST and thought it was a Zelda clone, and I would be fine with that. The moment I realized it has knowledge based akin to outer wilds and then obscure puzzles like Fez, I was in loved. Easily my GOTY in 2022 and still one of my favorite game ever.
Spoilers!
One of my "aha" moments while playing TUNIC was when I found out that, and I quote myself... "I HAVE STATS!?" And honestly, there are too many others to count. I felt very clever solving many of the puzzles, and I did the vast majority of them without an out-of-game guide. I would only consult a walkthrough when I felt truly stuck, but the information I needed was always there, or I just needed to explore a bit more. One possible exception to this was the existence of fairies. I knew that there were puzzles in places that I didn't know how to solve (Holy Cross), but I didn't know about the number of fairies needed for the good ending, etc. In addition, while I DID figure out what was needed with the Golden Door puzzle, and got the pages necessary to solve it, and even tried writing it out. However, a few of the manual pages are a bit tough to figure out in that regard, and I didn't feel like re-writing that thing over and over again until I got it right, so I did look up the actual pattern necessary to save myself the trouble.
So I did take a couple shortcuts here and there, but for 99% of the game I was totally fresh and unspoiled, and it felt incredible. I consider TUNIC to be a flawless masterpiece of game design; it does, in my opinion, exactly what it sets out to do, and pulls it off *perfectly.* That's not something I say about games very often at all. The developers should be extremely proud and I look forward to any future projects that they decide to bless the world with.
My "Aha!" moment in Tunic was in decoding the language. Right away you can tell that it's not a simple letter cipher, so I started taking notes: whenever I'd see some language, I'd try to copy it down. Eventually I figured out a couple of words, like "the" and "hi". From looking at what the buttons do on the controller page of the manual, I noticed that some of the words used there look similar but not identical to words used elsewhere, and I realized that the symbols represent concepts in some way. But no, that's not quite right, is it? I kept trying to figure out what various words were -- there's a page that explains what the fox icon means on the map, which is obviously "you are here", giving me those three words, and I could sorta figure out other words from those -- and eventually I understood what's *really* going on with the language and managed to decode the whole thing to the point that I didn't need to use my sheet anymore and could just read the manual plainly. At one point I even thought the developer was Canadian because of a weird spelling ("aboat" instead of "about", I think). I did eventually have to look up some puzzle solutions like how to get into a particular secret room (there's a button on the wall that you roll into -- I was sure I'd tried that, but I guess I hadn't), but I did almost all of the game myself, including the Golden Path. I thought that part was really cool, but solving the language itself was by far the coolest part for me. I mean, also the process of discovery in general. What a great game. Tunic is up there with La-Mulana, The Witness, and Obra Dinn. (Not Outer Wilds. That game was fine, but it doesn't compare.) I don't know when something like it will come around again.
Weirdly, the game that comes to mind after hearing your last question is Anodyne. While they're nothing alike aesthetically, they both gave me the same feeling of mystery and discovery as if I was an archeologist slowly uncovering pieces of a lost world.
I was recommended Tunic by someone very close to me. I played through the first little bit of the game before without getting super engaged and then life happened and I took a long break. I got back into it fairly recently. My first real “AHA” moment was discovering fast travel, something I figured the game just wouldn’t have. It wasn’t the only time my mind was blown.
Funny, I just released my final video in my Tunic playthrough last week! I admit it was a bit over my head at the end, but I'm pleased with how much I figured out on my own. Now I'm left to wonder if there will ever be a sequel...
I followed this game when it was announce because it looked cute. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for, and I only just played it a few weeks ago. This is definitely one of the most sleeped on titles to come out recently, it is an absolute masterpiece in game design.
funny. I remember finding your channel not too long before or after I heard about Tunic. It was a game well worth the wait.
My favorite "aha" moment was the language puzzle, with the golden path being a close second. Seeing how it worked made me go "ohhh" and I started absorbing everything I missed.
I remember going "oh hell yeah this game is good" when things started to click, the I started understanding how to decypher the made up language (which is fully translatable although unnecessary) and when the mountain path clicked in my head I went "oh no, the game is good" fully understanding how big of a task it was gonna be
Glad to see that you're back. Tunic is a fantastic game. I know the views may seem low, (though, they aren't too bad I don't think) but I do hope that if you continue to make videos, they will continue to rise
Well, shit. Now I gotta remember to watch this again after completing Tunic...
Amaizing way to create a video about a game like Tunic, dividing it in 3 parts hahah thanks!!!
Tunic is one of the best games I’ve played in recent years. Its up there with The Witness and Outer Wilds.
Animal Well is a different genre but equally satisfying in game discovery moments!
I got this game at the same time as two other family members, but I was the only one who beat it, let alone 100%'d it. So it was really frustrating trying to explain to them that the best part of the game starts after you get the regular ending. Another amazing "knowledge=progress" game that people seem to forget about these days is Riven (Myst 2). I finished it for the first time a few years ago and it definitely holds up.
This was the only game I can recall that literally made me take out a pen and paper for notes to be able to solve the golden path.
Really reminded me of playing old SNES games. Exactly what the devs intended.
It was an amazing experience to discover for the first time.
thanks for splitting into 3 categories for my category
- would love to play but will probably never find the time, but if i do, prefer its not spoiled.
I just about gave up on games... thinking I won't find games I enjoyed playing, then I found this. So far I'm loving every minute. I almost didn't play because it looks so Kiddish but it's truly a great game.
everyone knows about Trunic, the written language, but did you know there's also _Tunic,_ the musical language? Game goes deep, man...
As you said, It is the best game that you can't talk about if your friends haven't played it. Since you want them to also have all the WTF and AHA moments.
I accidentally did the gamer move and found the holy cross early but I thought it was only within the room with the turning cube. So I didn't think it was for anything else afterwards. I was so dumbfounded and amazed when I figured it out in the endgame.
It's in my top 5 games of all time and I can't talk about it.
Also, great format to actually talk about it with your audience. Have a great day and top notch video!
I'll admit, the manual's language was the best part for me. Spoilers, I suppose.
I had figured out "north, south, east, and west", while correlating that with the similar "up, down, left, and right". I noticed that these were all only a single symbol each; in fact, many "words" were just one or two of these glyphs big, and most English words are more than two letters, so I figured they represented something larger than a letter, but shorter than a word. I could only hope English was the final result given it was sprinkled about sometimes. I settled on syllables and if it was based on that, I considered the phonetic alphabet, something I had translated from another made up language for an online comic. When I saw the number phonetic consonants and vowels line up with the different variations of glyph layouts I knew I was onto something as syllables are made up of around one vowel and consonant on average. I began to translate the letters one by one starting with what I knew to be the directional words and make my way from there wherever I could guess what a word might be and see if the letters I knew lined up. Like "controls" on the page with the controller layout.
So glad this game finally got a physical release. This is the best 2D Zelda that's not titled Zelda.
Yay! Tunic! Waiting for someone to talk about it. Have you looked into rainworld yet?
For me it was definitely the pray mechanic. I spoiled the holy cross a little early so it fell a bit short. The golden path was another spot where i cane just shy of figuring it out on my own
Tunic has to be one of my favorite pieces of art ever
Where was the "aha"" moment in Tunic?...
My dear gamer friend... practically every single moment of Tunic was just a continuous SERIES of "aha" moments, from start to finish.
I only watched the first third of the video because I was curious about the game as the little fox looked a lot like Link, now I'm definitely gonna give it a try, thanks for the recommendation man.
I got stuck at the holy cross mystery, I’ll admit. I didn’t even know why it was. I had to look up what was up with that. I felt so so stupid. I was chugging along having a great time until then. Once I knew what it was, all the context clues seemed so obvious. I had no choice but to blame myself and respect the game.
Tunic is such a wonderful gaming experience that really challenged my expectations at every single turn.
What a crazy well designed game.
There is a place with 3 chests at the beginning of the game, close to the end you just discovered that you robbed the poor fox who was laying outside the place sad and disappointed :"(
This is the best game I have ever played and will likely stay the best game I have ever played for decades, nothing compares to playing tunic blind all the way through, every single time you learn something new in this game it's exciting, I wish I could forget all of it and play it again because so much of the game relies on playing it blind.
I love the secrets in Tunic, but the fighting is actually bit hard for me to a point it gets frustrating.
There's a reduced difficulty setting, and also an invisibility option in the settings menu, so combat is optional
Just started. So far. So much fun. True adventure game
When I first played tunic I figured out that if I held the run button while still the fox would do a cute bow. I bowed in front of the checkpoint statues and nothing happens. However there is no partials that shown. Your character only shows particles when bowing until you have gotten the page on your save or a previous one, or have bowed near a tower a hero’s grave or a teleporter. So it was a little sneaky that it did that. If it had particles from the very start I would have thought it was more important.
I loved the exploration in the game but I couldn't finish it, the combat was difficult for me but not in a challenging way, more in a janky way. I felt like I was fighting the game more than the enemies. I got all the way to the heir boss fight and finished the first phase by spending a bunch of consumables only to realize I was only halfway through the fight and promptly died in 2 seconds. I love difficult combat in many games but for whatever reason tunic's boss fights in particular just killed my mojo. If there was an easy mode to compensate for me not being able to git gud with the combat, I'd absolutely love the game explicitly for the INCREDIBLE exploration and sense of discovery in the game.
Another good video! Keep it up bro
I'm 10 minutes into the game, and it already feels way more like proper Zelda than TotK or BotW
I’m begging you snoman, do a good game design on hyper light drifter! There’s so much you’d love about it!
I was liking the game, enjoyed some bosses and their challenges, learned way too late how to level up the parameters, but, for some reason, I ended up dropping the game while in the underground, right after the battle with that boss that you featured behind the title card of full spoilers.
I bought the game precisely because of this review, and yet I forgot all about the Holy Cross until I got to that point in the game, so I just started a new save instead of backtracking. 😅
Also, the bottom of the Cathedral was pretty cool. It took me days strategising the best order to take on each enemy cluster to regain health and magic. 👌
I’m enjoying this game very much and reminds me a lot of Brave Fencer: Musashi for PS1 😢
Tunic is a game way up my alley. Its also one I can acknowledge is experty made but did not love. I feel like it was too heavy on its cryptic/secretive nature for its main quest. I also found the challenge level high for its controls or its aesthetic for that matter. This coming from someone who beat Hollow Knight on Steel Soul mode and all SoulsBorne games yada yada. I can't help but compare it to Death's Door which came out maybe a year prior and I find superior across the board.
Im eager to hear about this game dude.
You know, I had avoided this because I heard the combat was tediously difficult, and I generally avoid games of that nature. I LOVE exploration and finding secrets, though, so I downloaded it from Game Pass after watching this. I found the combat tolerable until the first major boss. Luckily you can turn on an invincibility mode so I don't have to waste my time with the combat and just enjoy exploring.
Okay, I'm convinced. I'm stopping the after the semi spoiler section. I'll play tunic already... Eventually.
Eff yeah, loved this game! ❤🎉
Thank you for a great video. TUNIC was a fantastic game that I will always rate as of of the best I've played.
Side question: Do you have any idea if the TUNIC developers have started to work on a new game?
my one big complaint with tunic is how you kind of need to play it all in one go, it was a pretty fun game but then i stopped playing for a while and when i came back i realized i remembered absolutely nothing and i got completely stuck. There's not much you can do to avoid that kind of thing in a game like this, where knowledge the most important thing, i do still want to go back to the game and finish it but i'm not looking forward to hours of running around in circles trying to remember where i had to go
I beat tunic completely blind and I was really disappointed. They made it look as if it was a typical zelda-inspired adventure, but that all goes out the window by the time you ring the second bell, and some of the puzzles are way too obtuse without a guide. Even the Trunic language should have been decoded automatically by the time you beat the game, and theres so many red herrings
This game is a hidden gem
The graphics remind me of Ocean Horn (I & II).
Tunic's secret secrets have secrets
Stopped at the full spoiler. This looks amazing!
My "aha!" moment in Tubic was when I watched a video abiut a girl losing her mind teying to solver Tunic's final secret. Her channel seems to have been deleted, sadly. Anyway, the aha! moment was the sudden realization I would hate this game because I have hated every single puzzle game I have played. The part you say it's incredibly satisfactory about solving a cryptogram-like ouzzle would be incredibly tedious to me, and I'd immediately Yahoo the answer.
I like puzzles like those in Silent Hill. I liked Catherine's Full Body puzzles in the demo, but I didn't olay the complete game. I stopped playing CrossCode because I was spending more time Yahooing solutions than playing the game (also, the music is irritating).
Tunic is a game that's so well designed that it honestly intimidates me. It also had the good sense to hide all of its ARG like gameplay behind an actually engaging Zelda/Dark Souls-esque base game, unlike something like Tunic where the ARG was so much at the front and center that it was difficult to play casually as a *game*.
A big aha moment for me was near the beginning when I finally had the right manual page to be the maps screen and saw my position marked. I still haven't finished the game, I felt the golden cross puzzles were kind of a chore. I might come back to it though later though.
Tunic is one of the most mixed emotion games I've ever played. The "hidden in plain sight" feeling of it is incredible, many of the puzzles are really good and very well-layered. But, on the other hand, many of the puzzles are gimmicks that are just... Going through the motions once you know the pattern. And sadly, all the lore and story is a big puzzle that builds up a ton of intrigue and proceeds to not do anything coherent with it. It just... Makes me sad. They had a half finished ARG that leads to more lore intrigue that doesn't fit into anything again. More puzzles and secrets to build intrigue with no real narrative coherence, again. :(
I love so much about the game and it still gives me a pang of sadness colored by its own focus on spectacle over substance in the story.
This would annoy me to no end.
Tunic rules😊
My only issue with the game is the music puzzle doesn't have a visual component and I'm tone deaf making it impossible and the haiku puzzle when you discover it's a lame haiku after all that work
i didnt like how hard the game got by the end, had to turn on god mode at some point
It’s a testament to how insane the secrets are that, after completing the golden path and getting the true ending, I saw 7:35 and said aloud “wtf is that?!”
God this game is good.
This is one of those games I wish I enjoyed. I can see the good game design and why people enjoy it and wish I could too, but after 25 hours I left and never returned. The punishing combat got in the way of what felt like could be a really neat exploration game, perhaps something like A Short Hike. And all the overarching puzzles just felt too obtuse. I would explore the entire discovered area and sit there scouring the game manual over and over again and not understand what I was supposed to do. It just ended up feeling really tedious until I finally decided to cut my losses and move on to a different game in my library. I wish I could've enjoyed it more.
I'm going to take the unpopular opinion and say that the golden path is probably one of the worst puzzles I've ever had to put up with in a game.
It's not that it's a hard puzzle, if anything it's too easy, the manual straight up tells you exactly what you're going to have to do going in. It's just that gathering those pieces, assembling them, then finally doing a full 100 consecutive button sequence all with minimal feedback from the game was tedious and annoying.
A good puzzle makes you feel smart, like you figured something out. You thought through the problem and figured something out. Tunic just hands you all those solutions in the manual, then treats inputting the answer as the real puzzle.
I know the golden path is a bad puzzle, because I figured it out long ahead of time (literally when I first saw page 49) and then had to put up with the same boring puzzles over and over again gathering its pieces, and when it was finally done, I didn't feel accomplished, like I figured something out, all I felt was annoyed and that my time was wasted.
i dunno, seems like a lot of work to me. you had fun though, good on ya.
Your list of people left one group out:
People who have no interest in the game at all, but want to understand why other people like it.
that was the first group
I feel like I'm missing out but I absolutely loathe the dark souls formula. I tried to play through it but that's a deal breaker.
Spoiler: Not having difficulty settings in your indie game in 2023/2024 is bad game design and disrespectful to customers.
Not for those who have a family and only (have time to) play games on weekends. The soul-like bullshit makes you waste time having to retrace the same thing again and again while the "encrypted" language just gets in the way of pacing. I spent 16 hours in this game and no longer have the energy (the will and time) to spend more on this because there are so many fun, fast-pacing games out there in my backlog to play. I may revisit this game in about 16 year when I'm retired and have plenty of time in my hand to repeat the same thing thanks to soul-like game style.
I fell into Camp B. Tunic didn't click for me. I much preferred Death's Door.
Going for a hot take: It's too frustrating to go for the good ending after you roll credits for the first time. I don't think the way the game thinks it ought to end and the struggle to get said ending are even worth it.
SPOILERS: To get the good ending, for some reason Tunic decides the best course of action for the player is to suddenly become a worse version of The Witness with more cryptic solutions. It's completely antithetical to the original game design of being a nice 2D Zelda/Dark Souls fusion. My inputs were only working half the time for these puzzles (even though I got the logic behind all of them), and I just resorted to looking up the solutions so I wouldn't waste anymore time with faulty inputs with no sort of audio feedback for what I was doing.
I also felt blue-balled that by the end, I never unlocked some translator for the fictional language. I was curious to learn what exactly the fox souls were talking about and whatever they were saying would recontextualize what I was working towards. I don't know how to explain it, but the manual being both in English and the fictional language gave me the expectation that I would be able to decode it.
Instead, the game ends with you freeing the Heir, which I had no interest in becoming closer to after they betray you.
I heard there have been people who have been able to create their own decoders after scouring the game for one-to-one translations, bu there's no fun in that for me having to decode everything for myself.
I don't think Tunic's a bad a game. I just feel compelled to point out these things myself since I don't know anyone else who had controller inputs not registering or who were disappointed by the game's ultimate conclusion.
the inputs were a 50/50 constantly for me but i struggled through it
it might just be a bad interaction with some controllers (i was forced to use an xbox1 pad when i played the first time) or something with the inputs having minimum input time from button to button. I usually had to input each correct solution 3 times and I was having my partner who wasn't concerned about spoilers google for solutions and fact-check my results
i really enjoyed everything up to the golden path and even most of the extra secrets and trying to solve the arg on my own, but i was defeated in the end by all of the spectrogram audio bullshit and it left a really sour note on the game at the very end
snoman here has the bird song trophy and shows the birdsong page """""""""""hint""""""""" explicitly in the video and i'm just baffled how anyone even with a spectrographic analysis managed to figure that one out
i spent hour(s) in front of that location reading the exact correct methodology but i guess i'm just a tone-deaf idiot
and then i read an interview later that the audio engineer for the game deliberately made the intervals of the wind-chime puzzle random and tone/volume could shift randomly because of the way the four inputs worked
it was a whole new witness-ship-door repeat of garbage audio puzzles right in the endgame to ruin the fun and enjoyment and experience
i feel like you read the title and didn't watch the video
I don't know, didn't enjoy it that much, way too much walking, way too much really boring time consuming backtracking, annoying occlusion issues and unnecessary amount of moving behind objects. Using shallow depth of field got really annoying quickly, it is only a gimmick. And then the souls like bosses that didn't fit the overall style of the game, and way too much of the same hack and slash combat.
What I found more disappointing was on my second play through, knowing what I did from my first, is that all that knowledge and where those shortcuts were only lead to roadblocks because the path needed to be opened by going through the "intended way" first.
For example, possible spoiler, but not very useful anyways, is the golden doors your see at the start of the game leads to an area that does have a back door, but even if you did know where the back door was and could get to it, you still can't access the inner chamber until you've gone through the front door and cleared the blockage.
I was teased with all these things I could have been doing from the start, but just didn't know about, only to find I'm still heavily blocked from sequence breaking even after I know about them.
The puzzles and exploration are cool. But the combat ruins this game
Nah man the game mistakes its shitty gimmick of hiding the required player input for an actually interesting secret while not even giving those 'mechanics' any beyond surface narrative contextualisation. The puzzles should take place inside the game or inside the player, not in the fuking required inputs on your controler. That's just cheap and boring.
They made a game slightly more obtuse than your average one, purposely hid all the tutorialisation and called that a secret, thats just purposely bad game design tricking players to think it is smart.
Dont @ me