TUNIC

What a masterpiece of a game!!! It is the second time I complete it, the first one was on GamePass but we all now that service is dead. There is so much to say, the exploration is amazing, the way everything is based on knowledge and the isometric style. This game just has it all, 11 out 10 experience. You have to play it as soon as you can!!!

This is a game of two halves: a fairly challenging hack-n-slash RPG, followed by a fairly challenging puzzle game. As someone who enjoys both genres, I was happy with this - both felt a reasonable difficulty in a game that wasn't dedicated to either. However, if you're not up for challenging boss fights, or not up for tricky puzzles, you will miss out on a lot of the game. The art style is lovely: simple shapes with varied colours and textures. The music is good, fitting, and different in each region. The controls are decent, though dodging can feel a bit sluggish if you're trying to do it frequently in a fight. The premise is that you're playing a typical RPG on a gameboy or something, but you collect pages from the manual as you go, and the manual is mostly in an unknown language. This is a nice mechanic, as there are some things you're told in the manual that it is very possible to work out by experimentation, which is a good feeling. You may or may not find that the other things which aren't really guessable are cool moments when they are revealed: I think it's neat that you could conceivably have done some of these things all along, but practically, most of them are not guessable, so the manual page functions more like an upgrade or unlock. The enemies in the game provide a decent graduated challenge as you gain power, although I would have appreciated a little bit sharper progression so that the initial enemies are more trivial by the end of the game, as you need to traverse some areas repeatedly for end-game content. The bosses are hard; I don't think I beat any on a first attempt. You can "git gud" and learn their attacks so you can dodge them and whack 'em, or employ a number of items to make things easier. I was a bit disappointed that the main magic items you unlock don't have enough uses for you to really go to town on them - for me they functioned as a way to make easy fights quicker, rather than to make challenging fights easier. After, I dunno, 30 or so hours, you'll likely be at the endgame. There is then a bunch of optional puzzle content, which you find a route into in the pages of the manual. This adds at least another 10 hours if you want to do it all. There are three separate groups of secrets, one of which gates significant end-game content, and two which are essentially there for their own sake as puzzles. One of the latter two is pretty easy, the other is involved, requiring you to translate the manual's secret language. I found all this pretty rewarding.