TUNIC

Au premier contact, j'ai pensé à un jeu mignon, sympa à faire avec de l'exploration. Et après avoir faire sonner deux clochés, j'ai abandonné. Les combats sont difficiles à maitriser mais surtout très ennuyeux. Les consignes de tâches à faire, à partir de pages trouvées ne me conviennent pas. Graphiquement c'était sympa, la vue du dessus ne me gêne pas, mais l'exploration sans indications claires, ce n'est pas pour moi.

You need to play this game. Go in blind and enjoy the ride. Tunic is not a very long game (unless you're trying to find all the numerous secrets), but it is a delight from start to finish. It has a lot of different influences, obviously Zelda, and the bosses feel almost like a Souls game at times. However, I think the two games that strike me as the most similar are Outer Wilds and Fez. Now, those are two very different games with very different gameplay, but they all share a common thread of figuring out what the hell is going on. You are thrust into a strange world with no explanation and must slowly figure out what your goal is and how to proceed. In Outer Wilds you have a handy concept map of different information that you learn throughout your exploration, but in Tunic you have the in-game manual, which is both very fun to read and also very essential to figuring out the truth of the world and what it holds. Gameplay is pretty simple, it is isometric and the combat doesn't have a huge amount of depth since you really only have the main sword and shield to attack, but some of the magic items and consumables help add some variety. If I were to point out one flaw it would be that the lock-on targeting can be funky when you're facing a lot of different enemies at once. However, although the combat doesn't rival the depth of something like Dark Souls, there is still challenge to be had. This is a far more difficult game than Zelda in my opinion, some of the bosses, the final boss in particular, were more difficult than I expected. The real meat of the game is figuring out what in the world you are actually supposed to do. The game doesn't give you any direction during gameplay, and not only that, but all the NPCs and the signage use a strange language which you can't understand (although a few words are in English or I presume whatever other language you may be playing in). In order to understand what to do to progress, you need to consult the manual. You find pages of the manual throughout the world, and in it you get maps to areas and information on game mechanics. However, the manual is also primarily written in the strange language, so you need to infer a lot of the information from context clues. The manual is the secret sauce to the brilliance of Tunic; it's pretty crucial for the game to work as well as it does, and the true ending is locked behind finding all the pages. Some of these pages are pretty tough to find, as well. The world itself is well designed, not too large for backtracking (which you will do a fair amount of once you try to get the true ending), but large enough to feel fleshed out and give a good amount of variety. One of my favorite things Tunic does is recontextualize your understanding of how the different areas fit together. Oftentimes you will go through the intended first-time path and then find a small shortcut that showed you could reach a later area much sooner through a cleverly hidden passage. There are a lot of hidden rooms in Tunic, so you should always carefully inspect the environment for a suspicious-looking wall or path that might be hidden by the camera angle. Another way in which Tunic recontextualizes your experience is through the collection of manual pages. I don't want to spoil anything in this review, but you will find pages that will make you realize you had abilities and options from the very beginning that you didn't even know were possible, and add new dimensions to how you interact with the world. This is even more apparent in the endgame when you are trying to solve the final puzzle. The game itself is fairly well paced, if you can figure out what you need to do. I can see that there are a lot of places you might get stuck, but remember to always check areas you thought you already explored; you may end up finding completely new main areas. The manual maps are usually a good hint of where to go next; if you find a map for a new area, you should look around to find where you may be able to access it. The manual maps also show an icon for your character denoting where you are in an area which is a nice touch. Where Tunic really gets crazy is in the endgame, where you are now armed with knowledge (hopefully having found most of the manual pages) and can start tackling its toughest puzzles. The final puzzle also requires carefully scouring the manual for hidden information, which is really cool. The last few hours I played I was poring over the manual more than actually being in gameplay. I would recommend not looking up anything for this, although some of the endgame puzzles can be brutally difficult to figure out, especially finding some of the more hidden things, so I did look up a couple things when I knew the concept of what the game was trying to get me to do but I couldn't figure out the exact execution. This is an easy recommendation if you enjoyed games such as Outer Wilds and Fez. There are so many lightbulb moments where everything clicks, and that's when Tunic is firing on all cylinders. The core gameplay is fun, but the experience of being lost in a strange world with an even stranger guidebook is super engaging and really motivates you to dig in. Overall, I think Tunic is a must-play, and I think it will (has?) take its place among the indie pantheon of masterclasses in game design.