Game Thoughts: Tunic
About a half hour ago I beat the "bad" ending of Tunic, a cute snes-zelda-esque game with a cute fox that gets way too hard. (mild spoilers)
I'm not sure I liked this game very much as a whole. There was about a 2 hour window window between the "oh this is just a snes zelda clone" and "ok I remember why that's not a bad thing", and then a nice handful of hours where I really enjoyed the game and what it was offering in terms of lore and gameplay... then the game decided it was time to get serious and cranked the difficulty to 200.
I have a very real skill ceiling when it comes to action-y parts of games, and I have neither the time nor the patience to "git gud". "Souls" games are essentially a watch-only thing for me, and Tunic delved just a little too far into that realm after a point. If you like dodge-rolling and dying a lot and re-treading then great; if you don't it can get extremely tiresome extremely quickly.
Thankfully, the game comes with some accessibility settings that make it easier. These range from disabling stamina depletion (allowing for infinite shield and dodge), to completely disabling death. I am fully willing to admit that I got to a point where I just flipped on invincibility so I could cruise through the rest of game -- and even then there was an enemy I had trouble beating.
A lot of wording online says to go into Tunic blind, comparing it to things like The Outer Wild. While the game has some mysterious puzzles and interesting revelations as you peel back the layers, it wasn't that for me. Outer wilds left me breathless, while Tunic just left me irritated.
After getting the bad ending I did a bit of research into getting the good one, and I was honestly annoyed even reading the solutions, so there was no way I was going to actively dothem. I just watched the other ending online; I think the kind of late-game and meta- puzzles that Tunic offers is for a different breed of puzzle-enjoyer than I.
I will say, the whole manual-page-collecting mechanic was very endearing and cleverly implemented, and the game looked and played wonderfully, the dark elements were unexpected and great. There was a lot that I liked in Tunic, but I don't think the good outweighed the frustrating for me.