{"id":23910,"date":"2022-03-30T10:16:20","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T00:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23910"},"modified":"2022-11-08T11:17:11","modified_gmt":"2022-11-08T01:17:11","slug":"tunic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23910","title":{"rendered":"Tunic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tunic-thumb\"<\/a>\"tunic-screenshot\"<\/a>\"tunic-poster\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Developer:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Andrew Shouldice
\nPublisher:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Finji<\/p>\n

O<\/span>ur hero – a fox-like creature wearing a distinctive green tunic – washes ashore on a mysterious island.\u00a0 As they explore their surroundings, the hero finds themselves a sword and a shield to fend off hostile creatures.\u00a0 The island contains many secrets.\u00a0 There are strange runes and stone monuments scattered across the land.\u00a0 As the hero travels further inland, he discovers dungeons, temples and pages from an ancient manuscript that begin to unravel the island’s many mysteries.<\/p>\n

Tunic<\/em> is largely the creative vision of a single person – Andrew Shouldice – who left Canadian developer Silverback Productions to develop this impressive debut.\u00a0 The game creates a strong first impression, borrowing heavily from the look and feel of classic top-down\u00a0Legend of Zelda<\/em> games from the NES era.\u00a0 The distant isometric camera angle combined with the low-fideilty\u00a0environmental design gives the game a charming diorama quality.\u00a0 The trees and shrubs that adorn the landscape look like they could be handcrafted and made from origami.\u00a0 There is a warm and inviting feel about the game’s colour palette and cutesy art design that belies the surprisingly sharp difficulty curve in the combat and wilfully oblique puzzles that gate the players progression.<\/p>\n

Although at a distance\u00a0Tunic<\/em> has all the trappings of a modern day\u00a0Zelda-like<\/em>, a few hours of progress in the game reveals many other modern gaming influences.\u00a0 It feels cliche to say at this stage but its impossible not to feel the comparisons to From Software’s\u00a0Dark Souls<\/em> games as\u00a0Tunic<\/em>‘s combat is mechanically designed around dodge-rolls and carefully timed swipes at enemies where even a basic dungeon creature is capable of defeating you if you get careless or cornered by multiple assailants.\u00a0 Death means getting sent all the way back to your last save point and any acquired experience is lost unless the player can make it back to the location where they were felled.\u00a0 Like I said.\u00a0\u00a0Dark Souls<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"tunic-screenshot\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Where I found\u00a0Tunic<\/em>\u00a0really shines is the puzzle design and exploring the world itself.\u00a0\u00a0Tunic\u00a0<\/em>was in development for seven years and I have to imagine a good chunk of that time was spent carefully crafting the\u00a0world and its many dungeons\u00a0which are filled with enticing secrets for any inquisitive player.\u00a0 This is a game where every time I poked behind a waterfall, looked\u00a0down a well, explored beneath a bridge or hacked away at shrubs, I would be rewarded with treasure, new weapons or one of the coveted game manual pages – the most triumphant innovation in the game.\u00a0 When\u00a0Tunic<\/em> begins, the player is thrown into the action with little to no explanation of what the game mechanics are or what the purpose is of many of the objects that can be discovered.\u00a0 Gradually the player discovered pages from a beautifully illustrated manuscript, which is actually the manual for the game itself, and only then does the game truly reveal itself.\u00a0 There were some supremely satisfying ‘Aha!’ moments that I derived from the pages of the manual, not to mention incredible game-changing mechanics that were hidden in plain sight.\u00a0 The puzzles in\u00a0Tunic<\/em> manage to successfully ride the line of being challenging and initially bamboozling but still absolutely solvable without any reliance on dumb luck or a walkthrough guide.\u00a0 The pleasure I felt from unlocking some of\u00a0Tunic<\/em>‘s mysteries really felt like they rivalled the best moments of\u00a0The Witness, Fez<\/em> and other modern classics of that ilk.<\/p>\n

For most players, I would expect the first half of the game to be an absolute thrill.\u00a0 Its retro-inspired visual trappings and satisfying puzzle mechanics will have a broad appeal and will rightly earn the\u00a0Tunic<\/em> many plaudits.\u00a0 If you sense there is a ‘…but’ coming, you’d be right.\u00a0 The weakest aspect of\u00a0Tunic\u00a0<\/em>is undoubtedly the combat and in the back half of the game, I think\u00a0Tunic<\/em> asks a level of finesse and skill in the player’s ability to bring down some of the late stage bosses that I think many will not be able to match.\u00a0 Some of these boss battles simply feel too difficult and that challenge is accentuated by the somewhat sluggish nature of the controls which feel serviceable when fighting the weaker monsters early on but never quite as sharp as you’d like in the high stakes encounters late in the game.<\/p>\n

This late game difficult spike would be a showstopper for me.\u00a0 I think the boss battle in the fourth dungeon is simply beyond me.\u00a0 Where\u00a0Tunic<\/em> has a “get-out” clause is in its accessibility options.\u00a0 Its possible to remove the energy meter which is turned on by default and prevents the player from endlessly spamming the dodge roll.\u00a0 About three quarters of the way through the game I turned that off.\u00a0 Then when I hit a wall with one of the bosses, I flicked a switch in the accessibility menu that actually made my character invulnerable.\u00a0 This obviously completely nullified any challenge in the combat sequences for the rest of the game but at that stage I had definitely had my fill of it and was happy I had an opportunity to finish the game and engage with it purely on my own terms as a puzzle\/exploration game.<\/p>\n

Now, ideally, I would have liked the balance of the combat to have worked in my favour so I wouldn’t need to turn it off entirely.\u00a0 Maybe its just me?\u00a0 I’m not so sure though.\u00a0 Anecdotally, what I read on message boards, heard on podcasts and feedback I got from friends, all suggested the same thing.\u00a0 At a certain point of time it gets too much and you’ll start dialling in some difficulty modifiers to see it through.<\/p>\n

Is it enough to spoil the overall experience?\u00a0 Absolutely not.\u00a0 This is still a wonderful game and an easy recommendation.\u00a0 Who knows, perhaps one day a software update may even be able to tweak the late game difficulty and dial it down a notch.\u00a0 Regardless, I found\u00a0Tunic<\/em> to be a lot more than I bargained for.\u00a0 It is so much more than the initial impression it forms as a charming but derivative\u00a0Zelda<\/em> game.\u00a0 It is easily one of the best action-adventure games of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fox-like hero is washed ashore on a strange island brimming with puzzles and secrets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23913,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3006,3004,651,2935,3005],"class_list":["post-23910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-game-pass","tag-tunic","tag-xbox","tag-xbox-series-x","tag-zelda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23910"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23915,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23910\/revisions\/23915"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}