Neat, now I do too.
Okay, took down the Siege Engine. That took a heck of a lot of whacking on him. You can see I have no health potions left and literally just a sliver of health left.
Haven’t been back to that fight yet. Found the Librarian, another boss I’m probably not ready for yet.
General theory about the game: Seems possible we’re “in a video game”, as in, physically in some kind of game cartridge. All these silver monoliths powering up pathways between things have a very circuit board vibe, and the red/green/blue hex triad has some obvious connections to video output (even emphasized by the CRT effect of your screen in the background when you’re looking at the pages of the manual. Or if we’re not actually in that scenario, the world has been shaped by that in some way. There’s even a drawing in the Librarian’s lab on a chalkboard that looks reminiscent of an NES cartridge.
Anyway, I’m struggling a little bit now with where I should go. I don’t mind the lack of obvious sign-posting, but this game’s obsession with obscuring pathways makes even retracing my steps to check a previous area a little tedious. For example, the ladders, ropes, and bridges that you activate as short-cuts once you’ve gotten through an area make sense as an element of the game, but come-on, even one of those I ran into ended up being a rope dropped down the backside of a cliff that you can barely see. These are supposed to be a payoff for exploring, not another secret I’ve got to remember because I might just walk right past it next time.
I like your theory on what’s going on.
I also have run into The Librarian. I think I can take him out if I run it enough times. I’ve come pretty close, maybe getting him around 80-90% health down.
I did get a third upgrade to my potions since the last time I went at him, so that might help a bit. I also just need to calm down. I get overly frantic when fighting bosses and lose focus on my basic fighting techniques.
Yeah, I got the potion upgrade after passing it up previously because I couldn’t figure out how to get it. Fortunately the chest was visible and very obvious. After having played a lot more of the game, I had a better idea of what to look for in terms of how to get to its location — in retrospective it was pretty obvious.
There are so many little hidden shortcut passages that I completely forget about them when I come back to the area. Then I think “oh, yeah, I forget I could get there quicker with this shortcut.” I’m sure I’ll forget the next time I visit.
I’ve also gone through the manual pages several times with a tooth comb. Definitely helped out a bit in several places and would have saved me some trouble earlier on if I had paid more attention to it.
Okay, took down The Librarian after another 5-6 tries. I guess I’m headed North again into The Quarry. That place is pretty rough, so hopefully I’m up for it. Of course with this game, it’s possible I’m entirely missing another area to tackle before that. I have instruction pages showing several other areas, but no idea where they are. Best guess is I’m supposed to head North first and maybe they’re up there.
Here’s a shot of my health after taking on the Librarian (moved to another location before this screenshot to not spoiler things). I not only have almost no health or mana left, no potions left, I also ate all but one of my strawberries and I’ve been saving those since I started the game.
So I haven’t made any meaningful progress other than exploration since before, no new bosses defeated, equipment found,* or stats boosted.
I found my way into the quarry earlier and noped out based on a very brief foray into getting my life sucked away by purple stuff and your warnings.
Later, exploring elsewhere, I found a new area which…turned out to be the quarry again. I sighed, poked around a little, and was about to leave, but died in a stupid way. Figured my ghost was close enough to where I came in to recover it, so I came back…but just kept pushing a little deeper. I discovered the enemies weren’t actually too tough to manage in isolation, especially if I used the grappling thing to pull them close from other ledges and stuff. But this whole time I keep brushing against danger with more of those purple energy areas slowly draining my max health. And yet…inching deeper into the territory. I even made it into the monastary, which seems like an incredibly stupid place to go, And yet…
So now I’ve actually cleared out the enemies in the area up to the gate you can open. But I’m also literally at no health, max hp drained all the way down. As for my asterisk above, I’ve just found the scavengers mask card. Which if I had to guess, protects me from the glowing purple damage, but since my life literally can’t go any lower right now, I can’t confirm.
Now I’m faced with a choice. Do I back all the way out and keep myself alive? I think I’ve killed everything between me and the way I came in, I don’t think anything will have respawned. If I were a betting man, I’d say I’m probably about to walk into another boss or something. But hey, what’s the worst that could happen? If I’ve made it here once, I could probably make it back here for my body again…
This part has been a lot of fun, feeling like I’m somewhere I maybe shouldn’t be yet and somehow staying alive. Even if it does all end in disaster.
If you’re wondering whether the Tunic reddit is a good place for non-spoiler info, I’m going to guess no. I just looked at it for a moment, and it looks like they do tag specific things with spoilers, but there’s still too much broadly hinted at in the first few thread titles I skimmed.
I was going to try to find out if there was a simple answer to what you lose if you die and don’t recover your ghost. Is it just some money?
Yes, that’s exactly what it does. There does seem to be a paucity of save points in that area. Also I feel like I’m missing something. Can you jump? I feel like we’re supposed to be able to jump in a few places, but I don’t have that ability. I’m not sure if I missed it or if I’m supposed to get it later.
I have managed to get to another area beyond that area, so maybe I’m on the right track.
As far as I can tell yes, it’s just money and honestly it’s not very much. It’s not like Dark Souls where you lose everything you’re carrying. It’s just a little bit.
Nope, I still can’t jump.
Thanks. I guess that means jumping ability is somewhere still up ahead.
I just double checked and the dying penalty seems to be 20 gold pieces.
After my adventure above, I ended up with just enough coins to discover their purpose, and then in retreading ground around some of the starting locations I fairly quickly found enough additional coins for another reward. That’s going to be helpful! In retrospect I might have been able to piece this together from the manual, but even if I knew what the coins were going to do for me, I didn’t have enough until now anyway (I had already figured out I should throw them in wells, just not why).
I also found a couple more stat boost items, and then an actual new piece of equipment. Using it seems straightforward but I don’t actually understand what it would help me accomplish yet.
I think I’m starting to turn a corner (no pun intended) on the overall geography of the world. I feel a little less frustrated by the big picture questions of where I should be going. It’s still trial and error for what I’m able to accomplish, but it feels less overwhelming now that I have a broad sense of what my options are.
I suspect you’ll pull further ahead of me, as I probably won’t have as much time to play during the week. I’ve enjoyed the updates though, sharing discoveries along the way is a lot more fun than either fumbling completely in isolation, or actually seeking out answers online.
Yeah, I had trouble figuring out the coins and the cards. I still don’t know what half the cards do (even some of the ones described in the manual). Also not 100% sure I understand the coin diagram. Maybe I do — I’ve got three slots unlocked which more or less matches the diagram for the number of coins I’ve tossed in — could be I’m overthinking it.
I got up to the next major boss and I think I can take him.
I’ve actually got the next week off more or less (need to finish up on grading for last quarter and prep for the coming quarter, but mostly it’s vacation). So either I’ll finish Tunic this coming week, or I’ll end up stuck on some boss I can’t beat.
Okay, took down the next boss again by the skin of my teeth. I had a much rougher time with him than I expected and probably went at him a good 20+ times before bringing him down. Earned the achievement “What now?” which is well named, because I had no idea what to do next.
Wandering about, I happened to stumble into an entirely new major area I had never seen before. Honestly I’m not quite sure how they expected anyone to find it. I guess at this point, I’ve played enough “Tunic” that it kind of made sense to be looking where it was, but it was pretty darn well hidden and I’d past it a good 2-3 times without having any idea it was there.
[Edit] Okay, after looking things over there’s kind of a hint in the instruction book if you stare at the map long enough, you might think to look there
Just hit a MAJOR shift in the game. Big emotional hit, too–very rude, Tunic! But fascinating.
Did you go down, down, down? That whole area definitely weirded me out. I strongly preferred the bright and happy starting area.
I’m with you! The game definitely gets darker as it goes…
This post is too long, I’m sorry. Tunic elicits very strong reactions though, and I probably won’t shut up about it
I ended up being able to sneak in more time in the evenings and at lunch in the past two days. I’ve “finished” Tunic. More on that later. I ended up very disappointed.
Quick question for Dejin:
I’m very curious what specific point this was where you found a new area you hadn’t seen before. When I got to the “What now?” achievement, it took me a few minutes of wandering, but when I realized where to go it was somewhere I’d been before.
Last Time…
To recap, the last time I posted I had explored the quarry, and found the scavenger’s mask card. Then I had mostly wandered previous areas, picking up more card slots by finding more coins to throw in the wells, and a few other stat boosts. Somewhere in there I also found the hourglass item which I could equip and use, but never found a reason for.
My next serious session I returned to the Siege Engine boss. I did resort to checking a few YouTube videos of this fight, and then ended up beating it pretty easily. I’m sure part of it was the couple stat boosts I’d found, but also a fairly simple strategy: pretty much just always be moving toward the boss, and counter-clockwise around it. Clockwise might’ve worked just as well, but the point was to always be advancing but in a circle around it, and almost all of its attacks will miss you. Nothing tricky to dodge or block, though you will have to chase it around the level for a while because it will frequently put distance between you. It has two targetable points, go for the one sort of underneath/behind it, and just be persistent. I beat it without using a single potion.
Feeling good about my progress, I next returned to the Librarian boss. The first time I encountered this boss I think I only made a single attempt and felt overwhelmed, suspecting (perhaps incorrectly) I was there “too soon” because I knew I still had the previous boss to defeat. I didn’t come up with a strategy as clean as in the above fight, but some liberal use of the magic wand and a little persistence gave me the victory in relatively short order.
Looking back now, this was the high point of the game for me. I felt like I mostly understood the geography of the world, the major systems in play, and was making satisfying progress “getting better” through the combination of in-game advancement and my own skill.
My next move was to return to the quarry that I’d partially explored before. This is where frustration started to build, and it effectively compounded until the breaking point in the final fight of the game. I can describe almost all of this without specific spoilers.
Thanks, I Hate It.
I don’t think I ever truly mastered the attack/block/dodge timing and mechanics. So undoubtedly, there is room for a player to simply be better at this game than I was. A more skilled player may not be nearly as frustrated. I understood the fundamentals of how stamina affected everything, but I never reliably mastered the timing of switching between them—particularly the vulnerability between your last attack input and raising your shield for a block. Attacks commit you to this window where even if you’re already holding down the block button, your shield won’t be ready yet, and that bit me time and time again. As a matter of opinion, I don’t really enjoy this, but I don’t think it’s “wrong”. I assume there are other games like this (maybe the actual Souls games? Never played them. Or perhaps fighting games?). It’s just a thing I didn’t enjoy, didn’t get as good at as I could’ve, and didn’t really expect—especially coming from Death’s Door, a “challenging” game that shared the superficial Zelda similarities, but with dodging and attacking combat that clicked for me right away.
I hated that trial and error was punished by depleting your consumable items. This sounds minor, but it really sucked. There was always a “save point” just before a boss, but when you died you weren’t reloading from a previous game state, you were being revived there. So if you used any of your consumables in your previous attempt, they were gone on your next try. (spoiler about an exception to this for some items: I did like the way the three bomb types unlocked a base level replenishment when you used them enough. Why not apply that to the other consumables?) Seriously, this sucks. It shut down a lot of experimentation and variety to what tools/weapons you approached a fight with. If you wanted to use any weapons/tools that consumed MP, almost any strategy would require replenishing your MP at some point during the fight. If I use all my blueberries (MP replenishing consumables), well that’s it. I can only do that once. I could backtrack and grind for a long time to buy more, but that was going to be a punishing grind. (There’s also a card that mitigates this in a way, but with its own fairly punishing catch.)
From entering the quarry to the end of the game, each big fight got harder and pushed me closer to the limit of my frustration. The final point of my tension with the game design was considering the assist options.
There are two options you can toggle, unlimited stamina, and no-fail mode (invincibility), with no in game penalty. You still get achievements, there’s literally no judgement from the game or downside, except come on, what’s the point? This could be its own essay. Why does dialing the difficulty in Guardians of the Galaxy down to almost no-fail and just going along for the ride work so well, when here I was so resistant to it? I can’t articulate it well, but the combat in Guardians of the Galaxy wasn’t really the point—I came to love that game for the writing and voice acting. The gameplay mechanics were always fussy and felt a little half-baked. In Tunic, the combat isn’t the only point of the game, but it’s much more integral to the identity of the game. It’s beautiful, there’s some sense of discovery, and I haven’t even touched on the puzzling aspects yet—a HUGE part of Tunic—but the combat also feels like a core part of the game, and to neuter that with no-fail really felt like I was giving up. So I resisted as long as I could, but it wore me down.
Specifics From Where I’m Pretty Confident Dejin Had Already Gotten Through To The End
Back to spoilers for specifics, which I’m probably needlessly breaking up into chunks. It’s safest not to read this until you’ve finished the game too, but in theory you can go spoiler by spoiler until I hit the point you’re at if you haven’t finished: The ziggurat, the area the quarry leads to, got frustrating. Fighting those energy creatures that would split when you killed them was surprisingly difficult, and eventually I resorted to sprinting past a big section of them between two save points. Then the boss, the boss of the scavengers. Hated it. Never found a good strategy. Dumb luck when I finally beat that.
I knew what to do with the three hexagon thingies now that I had them all. It wasn’t immediately obvious what to do right after that, but it didn’t take me too long to try going to that sword area you can reach from the teleport hub. I imagine it’s possible to win this fight, but clearly the game is designed for most players to lose, sending you to the ghost world, which lets you visit the swamp, and then the cathedral. At this point the quarry had worn down my patience and shown me how difficult things could be so that in each of these areas, as soon as I realized what kind of opposition I was up against, the appeal of thorough exploration had worn off and been replaced by the drive to just get it done. The “arena” fight at the end of the cathedral was tough. I finally beat it with a strategy that I only had enough blueberries to attempt once. As late-game combat challenges go it came the closest to feeling satisfying because there were some pretty clear strategic decisions you could make about what order to fight things in. It wasn’t just a big overpowering boss, there was time to re-think an appropriate strategy for each enemy type, and the challenge was stringing together a series of success that individually weren’t overwhelming. But it was still a challenge to pull it all off in one attempt, and I might’ve twisted my controller in half if that last attempt hadn’t worked and I was left with no blueberries for subsequent attempts.
This felt exciting! I got the laurel, the “jump” the game had been hinting at for so long!. It was nice to finally understand the purpose of the grave of the hero shrines, and there was a little bit of frustration to a few of them (again with energy beings that gave me trouble, more of the crawly ones, and a fight against the new type of upright ones) but it wasn’t too bad, and probably could’ve been easier if I’d tackled them in a different order so I would’ve had more of my stats restored for those two fights.
Back to fight The Heir again, who sent me to the ghost world. Back to an overwhelming boss fight that took me an hour. And then a big “screw you”, I finally beat it…and there’s a second form. That was it. That was my breaking point. I turned on no-fail, I admitted defeat. That was when I just stopped caring. Tunic isn’t for me. It was no-win: either I just tear my hair out replaying that fight for hours, or I accept the personal defeat of turning on the assist. It wasn’t going to be a meaningful sense of satisfaction either way, because the last few challenges had made that clear: beating my head against a wall to eventually eke out a victory didn’t leave me feeling accomplished or skilled, it left me feeling lucky and weary. I couldn’t stomach any more of that.
I could write another post at least this long of things I’ve read about on reddit now and haven’t found for myself and the post-game. After the above point I stopped trying to shield myself from spoilers and just read everything I could. I probably will write about that later today. But this is already way too long.
This really bugs me too. It only encourages my hoarding instinct. And when you decide to commit to a particular boss attempt by using some consumables and then fail… it feels terrible. But thanks for explaining the (very mild) offset to this. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant.
I’m past using the three keys now (I’m in the Cathedral… should I have gone to the Swamp first?) so I haven’t read past that part of your story. But I agree I didn’t find the Quarry particularly fun, and took many tries to defeat the boss. Also, I can’t shake the feeling that I should have an ability to jump across short distances? Like, why is there that save point surrounded by water in the Quarry? Because of the nature of the game, I don’t know if that’s a thing I’m going to be forced to get at a certain point in the story progression or something hidden away that I have missed and could have been using all this time.
If it gets harder than the quarry, I might turn on the stamina assist and see what difference that makes. I’m not really playing for the combat, but for the exploration and secret-finding.
I think you’re where you need to be. You said you’re in the Cathedral, so you’re in the place with the other foxes (of varying difficulty) as enemies, right? Asking because much earlier in the game, based on a not-very-close reading of snippets of the manual I mistook the Library for that place because that just seemed like what the architecture would be like for that place. Anyway, if you’re already in the Cathedral, I don’t know of a way to have gotten there without going through the Swamp first, but you could certainly have found a secret path I didn’t. The Swamp is just the graveyard area that led me to the where you are. I’m sure there are likely secrets I missed in that area, but if you somehow did get to where you are without passing through what you asked, there wasn’t anything essential there that you missed.
Earlier in this thread Dejin and I were asking each other the same question, “Can you jump yet?” I had a theory about this based on something in the manual that turned out to be correct, but I didn’t know enough to confirm my hunch until it happened. Spoiler, it was page 40 specifically. That will probably answer your question if you’re curious.
A general question for anyone who’s played enough of Tunic to have a sense of the combat, especially if you read my complaints with it in my lengthy post above: Is that what an actual Souls game is like?
I’ve only ever seen them played in videos, and I’ve been very tempted to try Elden Ring as my first Souls-game. I’ve always assumed there was a chance they weren’t going to be for me, but what little I could grok as an observer about how they involved managing stamina, magic, dodging, and learning enemy attack patterns looked like maybe it was something I could learn. Tunic has me re-thinking that. I’m still very tempted now just so I can make the comparison myself, but I’m more worried than before that it’s not going to be my cup of tea, and maybe I should wait for a sale instead of biting for full price on Elden Ring right now. In fact, Kirby and the Forgotten Land is looking more and more tempting right now. I was worried that wasn’t going to have enough challenge to enjoy, but at the moment that sounds delightful.
The conclusion of Eurogamer’s Kirby review:
Like its predecessors, Kirby and the Forgotten Land’s an open-armed thing, and now more than ever before it’s a game that’s for absolutely everyone, the move to 3D platforming perhaps the most significant step forward in the series’ history. This is an absolute hug of a game, and quite likely Kirby’s best outing yet.
Sign me up!