The Fox Says OW OW STOP KILLING ME ALREADY: Tunic

[MrBlarney]

Well, yeah. The instruction manual is pretty clear about that. But I wanted to go for the A ending before finishing the manual up to get the B ending. I basically knew everything I needed for the latter as I was working on completing the former. I just didn't expect that the battle with The Heir would be such a big jump in difficulty over the other boss encounters, and I didn't want to turn on any assists since I felt I had enough skill to see me through.

 

[Octopus Prime]

This is out on Switch now! Which is where I was waiting for it to show up!

There’s some slight graphical dithering when you play it on a TV and the frame rate, while steady, is lower, but it’s still aces and it’s portable and it’s fit in snugly with all my other Zelda’s in my Zelda’s folder.

I’m up to the first major boss and loving it!

Tunic? More like WOOHOOnic!

 

[lincolnic]

I'm playing this now too! On PS5 since I don't own a Switch. Having a great time so far, but I accidentally went into what was almost certainly the wrong area after beating the second boss last night. I found myself in the Quarry, which seemed to be where the game was leading me after opening the Sealed Temple, but then something in there reduced my health bar to the smallest possible amount and all I could do to fix it was die. It was not fun making a corpse run back in there to get my money, but it's done now and I'm going to explore somewhere else.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Yeah, you can't enter the miasma. Yet. (Alternately, you can turn on the accessibility mode and just go in there anyway.)

 

[lincolnic]

In my travels today I picked up a couple of ability cards, but they were blue-tinted instead of the tan the others have been so far. The blue-tinted ones don't seem to appear in my inventory at all. Is there a mechanic I'm missing here and I'll learn about it later, or did something go wrong?

Edited to add: I have the page of the manual that explains what most of the cards do, if that's helpful in answering my question.

 

[jpfriction]

I don’t recall there being different types of ability cards. Which ones did you pick up?

 

[ozacrot]

I might be misremembering, but if I'm not, the blue ability cards come into play in the second half of the game.

 

[Dark Medusa]

I believe you are misremembering, all ability cards should be usable for the whole game.

 

[ozacrot]

I'm thinking specifically of when you go to the "dark world" - you lose all your upgrades until you unlock them in that one room. Aren't the blue ability cards how you get those back?

 

[Dark Medusa]

My memory is also not perfect, but SPOILERS FOR NEAR ENDGAME no, you get your upgrades back by getting the dash in the Cathedral, and then go to each Hero's Shrine to pick up the stat-up item, which gives you back the stat they represent.

 

[lincolnic]

I think I was just mistaken. I was expecting them to also be blue in my inventory, but they're the same tan as all the others.

 

[lincolnic]

Beat this last night with the good ending. Overall I really liked it, though a few factors cooled me on the experience towards the end. I'm just gonna put everything below in spoiler text since it's impossible to talk about the game otherwise.

Okay, so the negative stuff first: I think the disparity in difficulty between the regular gameplay and the boss fights is way out of balance. I loved exploring the world and fighting against regular enemies felt great, but as soon as you enter a boss arena it's like you're playing a different game. It takes a couple of bosses to get to this point -- the Garden boss is fun and exciting to fight -- but generally the amount of damage that bosses can take and receive is absurdly overtuned. Siege Engine is probably the biggest offender here; even when you know how to play that fight it still takes way too long due to its gigantic health pool. I did like the Librarian fight, and the Scavenger Boss was almost fine (again, too much health), but overall this felt like a pretty glaring flaw.

There are also a couple of points where it feels like the game chooses to let difficulty come before fun, much to its detriment. The biggest offender for me has to be the Quarry. The health reduction mechanic, combined with the amount of time the game forces you to spend dealing with that mechanic while searching for the Scavenger Mask, feels awful. Not only are you forced to contend with powerful enemies, but you have to do it with your character more vulnerable than they've ever been, and the lack of a save point at the start of the area means you're subjected to an annoyingly long runback with every death. (I'm aware that there's a save point at the south end of the Quarry, but you have to fight through a ton of enemies and go past a health-sapping monolith to get there, which made me think I wasn't supposed to be going that way until I'd found the Mask.) A lot of other games will use an area like this to say "You shouldn't be here yet, go find the item that'll let you explore safely and then come back," but even when you're required to be in the Quarry, the Mask is absurdly far out of reach.

The other area that I felt was too hard to be fun was the gauntlet at the end of the Cathedral. It's just too punishing. I eventually had to look up a guide someone else wrote to get through it, and even that relied on having a few specific ability cards. Luckily I'd picked them up along the way, but if I hadn't it would've been so much worse.

I know there are accessibility options that could mitigate some/all of these issues, and I love that they exist, but I also want the game by default to feel fair. Most of the time it does! Some of the time it extremely doesn't.

Anyway, outside of those complaints the game was excellent. Exploration was a joy and the immersion was great. There are so many secrets -- maybe too many? It's astounding how much the game hides in plain sight. I got all the fairies, but I'm not smart enough to do all the secret treasures (I found a few) and the stuff beyond those. I had to look up a couple of Golden Path square solutions, and that wasn't satisfying, so I don't want to look up the rest of the treasures either. I'm just not that good at puzzles at the end of the day. But for the most part I really enjoyed my time with the game, and it left me wanting more. Maybe the Glyph Tower is pointing towards a sequel?

 

[Octopus Prime]

Just collected all the Macguffins

Everything is going great, forever!

 

[YangusKhan]

I started this game last Thursday and now I'm well on my on way to reaching the "good ending." I gotta admit, I was waiting and waiting for this game to "blow my mind" since that was all anyone ever says about it, and it was starting to feel like that would never come. Until I found That Page of the instruction manual and learned what the Holy Cross was. That was really cool and clever, but honestly up until that point I thought it was "just" a solid MetroidvaniaZeldaSouls.

Anyway, I still have to find 7 more faeries, and then figure out what the Golden Path manual page is even trying to tell me because so far I am mostly stumped on that one. Oh, I should also say that I never really had a problem with the combat in this game. Most boss fights took me 1 or 2 tries except for The Librarian and The Heir. If anything it feels like the sword should have just a bit more reach than it actually does, because there were so many instances where enemies would be just outside of my attack range and that was frustrating.

 

[lincolnic]

If anything it feels like the sword should have just a bit more reach than it actually does, because there were so many instances where enemies would be just outside of my attack range and that was frustrating.

I agree, either the sword should've had a little more range or a little less knockback.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I figured finding a second sword was going to address that.

Apparently not

 

[lincolnic]

I figured finding a second sword was going to address that.

Apparently not

According to the main dev, that's there to provide options for speedrunners. I learned this watching the recent GDQ run today! (Don't watch it until you finish the game.)

 

[YangusKhan]

I achieved the good ending and felt like a goddamn genius doing it, so, good job game designers.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I started playing this fox game! It is extremely Zeldy, particularly from the instruction booklet which is utterly charming. I'm only an hour and a half or so in; I still don't know what most of the items I have do, but I guess that's OK! I have the sword and shield now and I'm just dooting around exploring. I suppose next up is to follow some of these maps around to new areas.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I finished playing this fox game!

Spoiler: Spoilers for fox zelda

Got the bad ending last night and picked up the last 3 pages to get the good ending today. Overall thoughts:

Incredibly clever, very well designed with a lot of forehead-slapping and mind-popping shortcuts and minor revelations. If you actually figure everything out yourself it makes you feel like a genius. Beyond that it's still a fun, extremely competent Zelda. Very good overall.

The boss combat was a bit tough, but mostly felt fair. I had some different solutions for things, it looks like; the Siege Engine boss was fucking terribly frustrating while I was trying to hit its back weak spot, but once I gave up and just hit it in the face I took it down immediately. I guess I always had enough attack, defense and healing to make it through bosses without feeling like stuff was overtuned. I solved one combat encounter, the pink fucker in the quarry as a ghost, before I had any of my hero stuff back except for stamina by turning my health pots to mana potions, not getting hit, and spamming the gun (one shot per potion since you only need *some* mana to cast it once). The zippy dash in particular made stuff feel a lot better. The final boss wasn't as hard for me as some of the others, or I suppose it was about equally as hard, and felt suitably challenging; I beat it just by the skin of my teeth and felt great.

There were a LOT of puzzles and they kinda hit all at once; when you figure them at or near the end it can be kinda overwhelming. I can't help but feel that dropping the Holy Cross truth on the player a bit earlier would have been better; as it is, it kinda turns into a new, separate puzzle game right when you're getting ready to wrap everything up. I suppose there's something to be said for that, but it's not how I would've done it. But damn, that reveal in and of itself, in its simplicity and complexity, I thought it was A+ game design. Similar for the revelation about, combining the wand and magic dagger for freeze beams, plus grappling to frozen enemies - There's a lot of "YOU CAN DO THAT?!?!?!" that hits you and they're all great moments.

I didn't find the Hourglass until the literal end of the game (while I was collecting Fairies for the last piece). I have no idea what it does. And did someone say there were 2 swords? I only ever found one! Also, apparently you can parry or something? I think I did it accidentally once and never managed to get it again.

Anyway. Good game. If you haven't played it and are reading this, you should try it, and try to go in as spoiler-free as possible. Don't click that spoiler box! Or any others! Go on, git!

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I just finished my 2nd playthrough of Tunic and it was a top-tier gaming experience. When I first played the game, last year at launch, I thought it was beautifully crafted, but too demanding of the player on every level. The combat wasn't quite tight enough to support the difficulty of boss fights, and the layers and layers of puzzles made my brain hurt. I got the bad ending and spent a few days exploring the world looking for secrets, but eventually got frustrated and gave up. I knew that my son was going to ask me to play it again somewhere down the line, so I decided to put the game down with some of its secrets left unsolved, figuring I'd push a little farther in the next time I played it.

Well that time finally came, and playing Tunic for a second time was, in my opinion, a better experience than playing it the first. Probably best to just put the rest of the post in spoiler text, since I'll be talking about all kinds of things:

First of all, knowing how the game systems worked made dealing with the combat and exploration a lot easier. I could use the holy cross to get extra money, bombs and upgrade items, ramping up the fox's power curve way faster than the first time I played. I got the shield BEFORE fighting the Siege Engine, and boy howdy did that make that fight easier. I knew roughly which ability cards to use and I wasn't stingy with bombs, since you just get more the more you use them! All of that combined to sand down the edges on the difficulty, making for a pretty smooth experience. Bosses still took a few tries, but nothing got too frustrating and I could focus on looking for secrets in the world.

The biggest aha moment came when I finally understood the principle behind the Golden Path. Once it clicked into place that each page of the manual had a part of the solution, I explained the concept to my son and he got super motivated to try to solve it. We collected the pages and started going over them, trying to figure out where the path segment was on each one. I made a template that I printed out so he could starting filling in the squares as we found the pages. He was even motivated enough to bear with me as I worked through the various fairy puzzles - normally, he wouldn't have the patience for that sort of thing. In the end, there were 4 or 5 pages that we got wrong, either because they didn't quite conform to the expected rules or because some graphic design element confused us (seriously, sometimes it isn't very clear what is or what isn't part of the path). If I had been playing by myself, I might have spent a little longer trying to figure things out before looking things up. But my son only had so much patience and I didn't want this to turn into an ordeal for him.

In the end, we opened the mountain door and got the good ending, and had one of our best shared gaming experiences ever in the process. I'm sure we will be playing Tunic again down the line, and there are definitely a few hidden secrets still left to unearth, but I don't think anything is going to top our 2nd trip through the game.

 

[Yimothy]

My kids got me a physical copy of this for switch, which comes with a map and like three booklets, one of which is a copy of the in-game manual. We started playing using the map and looking a bit at the manual before I noticed the bit at the start saying not to read it until after the game. Anyway, it’s mostly in code and I don’t think I learned anything useful without the context of having encountered it in-game.

We’re playing the game three times simultaneously - my playthrough on default settings, and the kids’ two playthroughs on no-fail mode, which is a pretty cool feature. They’re making reasonable progress although the younger one has decided not to pick up any manual pieces, not sure if that will limit progress. Myself, I recently picked up the manual page that shows how to increase my stats, which was a real relief.

I didn’t know much about this game other than people seem to like it. I was expecting a particularly polished Zelda-em-up. The Soulsiness surprised me. I found the early part of the game quite challenging, though that’s at least in part because of my general badness at games. I haven’t got the dodge roll down yet, and now that I have the shield my chances of getting better at it have gone down dramatically. I also have a heap of consumable items I haven’t tried yet. I should get over the fear that I’ll need them and just risk wasting them.

 

[Dark Medusa]

Not picking up manual pieces will limit progress, in the sense that it's very hard to figure out what to do without them.

 

[Yimothy]

I’m playing this very slowly. Just beat the garden knight, which followed the souls game trajectory of this-is-impossible to that-was-easy with a little deviation into the-boss-fell-out-of-the-arena-and-I-have-to-reset. I am still terrible at dodge rolls.

Because I had a break between play sessions I was a bit disoriented and wound up retreading a lot of territory before finding my way to the boss. One big difference between this and souls/zeldas seems to be how far enemies will follow you. It doesn’t seem to be an option to just run through places you’ve already been. I’m sure this is disproven by speed runs, but I had like six crocodiles and four of those little flying freeze bolt shooters coming after me all the way to the save point.

 

[Yimothy]

The game seems to have opened up quite a bit after the first boss. I think I had three choices of where to go next: over the mountain, which I tried once and found too scary, a forest or fortress or something I forget, which I opened a path to but didn’t enter, and meditating to get access to those yellow panels which I presumably could have been doing from the start if I’d known it was an option before finding the manual page on it. That lead me to the ruined atoll and the frog’s domain, where I got the whip which will allow me to reach the various hooks and tuning forks I’ve been seeing, which should open things up even more.

I really like that the item I just got, which uses MP, only uses it against enemies. Using it to navigate is free. That was the right choice.

 

[Adrenaline]

You don't need the manual to do anything in the game, but without it you're unlikely to discover key information that you'll need to advance. It's pretty clever.

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve made a fair bit of progress since my last post: I beat the Librarian and the Siege Engine, so I have two out of three glowing hexagons. I’ve also been to the graveyard but don’t seem to be able to get in, so I made my way to the quarry, which is a pretty harsh place. Aside from the miasma, there’s a real lack of save points meaning I have to go really far without refreshing my resources, plus I find several of the enemies hard to deal with - the ranged attackers can be hit with magic, but I keep running out of mp and I find target selection pretty frustrating - the knockback from the magic attack seems to push them out of focus range and then the fox will focus on something else or just lose focus altogether until I release the button and hold it again, so I wind up wasting shots or taking hits I didn’t need to. Also I keep accidentally hitting the shoulder button while holding the trigger and so bringing up the menu without meaning to, then randomly allocating an item to the slot where I keep the sword because I press it either trying to swing the sword or because B is normally the cancel button and I expect it to take me out of the menu, then using up all my stock of that item because I’m trying to swing the sword. I need to see if I can reallocate the menu to the cross button or something (playing on switch).

Anyway, I eventually reached the monastery, after several more attempts got through it (really needed to figure out how to use the save point outside it, but I guess I’m past that now). I think that was where I got the tile that makes me immune to miasma, but I didn’t figure that out for quite a while (I later noticed I had three coins, so I put them in a well, got another tile slot, and saw the one that looks like a gas mask - really should spend some time figuring out what the various tiles do) so I was still struggling making my way through the lower area of the quarry. Anyway, eventually I got the gun, which appears to use too much mp to be really useful unless it just chews through bosses or something, and made it to the entrance to the ziggurat, where I at last was able to save and refresh my resources.

I think I might be doing better if I were playing this with more focus, instead of for an hour or two once or twice a week. I come back to it and I can’t remember which items do what or which of the various paths I’ve already taken. Still really enjoying it though. I’ve managed to stop myself looking stuff up (was sorely tempted with the miasma in the quarry though), and god willing I won’t look anything up. Trying to figure it all out is really enhancing the game for me.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I don't remember exact details since I played it two years ago, but I remember that the gun was pretty excellent.

 

[Yimothy]

Well, the Scavenger King gave me enough trouble that I gave up on it for a while and went back to exploring, though I didn’t find much - another coin or two, I think. I also found out you can meditate at the hero graves, which was a “oh man, how did I miss this” moment, but it seems to lead to a dead end. Maybe the bridges will complete themselves as I get more upgrades? Anyway, I eventually went back to the boss scavenger, but just couldn’t get it. My hits do so little damage. In the end I beat it using the gun and all of my MP recharge consumables.

After that I was able to mount the gems in the room past the door that the bells unsealed ages ago, which didn’t really have any obvious effect. I went to the quick travel hub where I met the heir, which didn’t go so well, and now I guess I’m a ghost, so it’s time to visit the cemetery. Just as soon as I go every other place I can currently get to. I wish I’d visited the imprisoned fox before going to the heir - now I’m not sure if they’re the same character or not. Oh well, nothing for it but to press on.

 

[Yimothy]

I got through the graveyard and the cathedral, though there was a hidden area on the map of the latter that I couldn’t find. Hopefully that’s for coming back to later. The pseudo boss rush in the basement of the cathedral was pretty good. I made a couple of attempts and resigned myself to probably never getting past it, then I made a few more and started getting my hopes up, then a few more and I beat it. I started with the two garden knights, who I could kill very quickly but who could also take me out in two hits. Next I took on the wizards, who were pretty easy but took a bit longer and could also kill me pretty quick if I messed up. Then the chunky dudes with the swords, most of which I could get rid of by charging at them as they appeared and taking them out before they could react, and the others I was able to kite around, soften up with bombs, and finish off with a few more hits. After that I think I did the health refill, then the little flying guys who I think were there as an MP refill but who I could only beat by using all my mp with the staff so I wasn’t able to use MP on any of the earlier enemies, then I finished off with the skeletons, who I kited around until they’d all appeared and then took out with two shots of the gun. I think there was another enemy type in there somewhere I’m blanking on. Anyway, pretty cool fight.

And now I have the short range teleport, which answers so many “how am I supposed to get there?” questions from earlier in the game. Not sure how I’ll get back to those places though since I’m still a ghost and most of the world is blocked off by miasma.