TUNIC Reviews

One of the best feelings of discovery I've found in recent gaming. If you love to solve puzzles and learn everything by deduction and intuition, this is the game for you, and it has great combat also! Maybe even a little hard at parts! If you don't like combat based things you can even use an accessibility option to not die with anything, so do yourself a favor and experience this game!

Tunic is an incredibly unique and well made game that is very much worth playing because it does some things that few games have done before it (like OWDDK). Why then the negative review you may wonder? Because these aspects are dragged down a lot by soulslike mechanics that were shoehorned into a game that had no need for them. Combat in tunic is not fun, i went into this one expecting snappy & fun combat akin to Death's door but instead was met with cumbersome stamina based combat that is just too hard for this type of game. You can alleviate this with invincibility but that's not much fun either now is it? The bosses in this game were even more brutal and not at all as fun as a boss should be. The final one especially made me finally yield after an hour, forcing me to resort to godmode. However if you're good at these sorta games or don't mind using invincibility then there's no reason not to play this game as everything else it does is incredible. Pretty visuals, enjoyable music, GREAT level design and a cool story all make up the bones of a good game but what sets Tunic apart is the Outer Wilds' styled discoveries. I will not spoil any of these but Tunic is the only game that gave me a sliver of that Outer Wilds Dopamine Drip of Knowledge (OWDDK, now the first sentence of this review makes sense :D finally). It's a shame then that this incredible aspect is hidden beneath a needlessly punishing game. Still though a game worth playing for that OWDDK with the asterisk of combat.

This game does have some interesting ideas but fails on two critical points: - Fussy enemy locks - Cryptic progress and character mechanics - Crash wipes out hours of progress despite checkpoints in between The last point being entirely unacceptable considering I defeated one of the most difficult bosses and acquired a key item before the crash.

I don't think this is a bad game, but I found pretty much every aspect of it to be slightly annoying. Every hidden path I found seemed a result of the isometric camera obscuring a path in a way where I didn't even realize I could go in that direction. Combat felt tedious and repetitive. The manual is a cool idea, but I quickly got bored flipping through the pages for clues. Overall, I stopped having fun after a few hours.

A charming and atmospheric adventure with a unique system that REQUIRES more games to use. Hopefully the studio makes another game with the same system. The game is an adventure puzzle. The combat is not that difficult and the game is very generous. However, nothing is as shallow as it seems. Everything has a deeper secret that you need to learn to uncover. I personally did not have the time to transcribe and translate the symbols, but the smaller (5-20mins) headscratcher puzzles I did by myself.

TUNIC could have easily been a 10 out of 10 game for me. Amazing exploration and storytelling. Puzzles are not very complicated, and don't tickle my brain the way a puzzle in a Zelda title does but they're okay. But the souls combat is horrific. After awhile it's just not fun. It feels like a chore. It's been a trend for developers to mush souls combat into their games and it shows. MOST OF THESE GAMES DON'T NEED SOULS COMBAT, INCREMENTAL DESIGN WILL SHOW YOU WHAT BEST FITS FOR THE GAME. If you want to have a fun experience devolve into a blunder then play this game. 6/10.

Great game that goes way beyond than just being a "Zelda-like". Lots of good ideas, the gameplay is extremely refined, the difficulty is demanding but fair and the way it handles secrets and collectibles is the best I've seen in quite a while. Great level design and a wonderful take on the current absence of instruction manuals (and their value beyond just mere nostalgia).

Tunic excels in exploration and discovery, capturing a rare sense of mystery that few games achieve. Every new area and hidden secret feels genuinely rewarding to uncover. Unfortunately, the combat is a major weak point, and its flaws become painfully obvious during boss encounters. Enemy hitboxes often don’t align with models or animations, your attack animations can't be cancelled, and enemies barely react to being hit—yet they can take a third of your health while you’re still recovering. At times, it even feels like inputs are being dropped, adding to the frustration. After defeating one of these bosses, I found myself reluctant to continue, knowing there would be more of the same ahead.

Amazing metroidvania. The game may appear slow and unresponsive and have an oversimplistic dull combat system at first. But I only had a problem with that on keyboard and mouse, once I switched to gamepad it felt a lot better. Unlike what others said, the combat is fair and perfectly manageable. Combat isn't central anyway. You don't need to decipher the alphabet to finish everything.

This game caught me by surprise with its 10/10 level design. Similar to Fez, it's full of secrets that you wouldn’t even realize exist unless you find the pages scattered throughout the game. A brilliant experience that kept me hooked until the very end.