a review of tunic
I have bad taste in games. Well, I'm pretty sure I have bad taste. Or, at the very least, I struggle to develop what could be thought of as good taste. I'm easily swayed by others' opinions (though I am picky about who those opinions come from), always cautious about being on "the correct side" of a discussion lest my friends and acquaintances think me dull, boring, foolish... You can really see the fear of rejection here, is what I'm saying. So I always try to play "the right games" and have "the right opinion" about them.
TUNIC challenges me on this. I started this game knowing not only what people had to say about the mechanics of the game—it's like the first Zelda!—but also how people felt about it. And people love this game. Well, I love The Legend of Zelda, hereafter referred to as Zelda 1. I loved playing it for my first time as an adult, taking notes and drawing my own maps, my partner serving as a proto-Navi to help out when the NES translation was lacking but never directly giving me an answer outright. I loved learning the world of Hyrule and then learning it all over again in the second quest, shuffling all the secrets and prime locations around. I have a Matt Cummings original of Spectacle Rock specifically to commemorate playing this game with my partner.
And so, going into TUNIC, I thought it would be easy—correct, even—to have "the right opinion" about this game. That I loved it, that it was a beautiful reimagining of what made the first Zelda so inspiring, so ground-breaking, such a stone-cold classic.
TUNIC's alright.
The combination of combat-puzzle-adventure that TUNIC aims for is, theoretically, one that I should like, but the particular ingredients used for "combat" and "adventure" don't suit me very well as a gamer at this point in my life. Starting with combat: it's hard. It's, like, stupidly hard at times. I spent a lot of time thinking back on what combat is like in Zelda 1—kinda clunky, serviceable mostly, sometimes hard!—but combat in TUNIC specifically wants to feel like a challenge. It wants to amplify this particular element to something spectacular all on its own. And reader, I hate it. I hate the combat. I hate the delay between dodging and swinging my sword, I hate how often I got stuck on geometry. I cannot stand this type of combat, apparently, at least in TUNIC.
The geometry also leads to my second fundamental problem: the adventure. But I'll get there by way of a detour back into Hyrule. If you are not familiar, Zelda 1 has what is known as a "second quest" which I briefly mentioned earlier. The overworld is the same, but the location and secret entrances have all been shuffled--the final dungeon, for instance, is no longer in Spectacle Rock in the second quest, but elsewhere in Hyrule. The dungeon layouts are also different, and, unfortunately, they lean heavily on the use of two-way and one-way "fake" walls. How do you know if a wall is fake? Barring an in-game hint suggesting it...you're going to have to walk into walls. You can make educated guesses about which walls, but you'll still have to do it and probably fail a bunch, and some of them are tricks, elongating your time in these dangerous places.
The experience of a Second Quest dungeon gets blown up to incredible scale in TUNIC, because all the world-map secrets of this game (barring the fairies, but we'll get to that) are just...geometry tricks. Twists on the idea of these fake walls. And it's utterly maddening to run around, trying to figure out if a corner is really a corner or actually a super-secret hidden pathway to treasure. Finding secrets in this way felt like drudgery rather than exciting.
(I'll interject here to say that secret-finding in Zelda 1 is also its own kind of drudgery since there's usually no way to know which portion of a wall or which bush will hide a door. I just don't think TUNIC improved upon this in any meaningful way.)
At this point it feels like I've tossed out the entire game, but there's one remaining element to TUNIC, and it's the part that shines the brightest to me: the puzzles. Oh my goodness. I had so much fun figuring out the fairy puzzles and it was an absolute beautiful rush to solve the door at the top of the mountain. At one point while solving that puzzle—I got a notebook and pen specifically to try to figure this one out—my handwriting was so erratic (due to excitement) that I couldn't read it anymore. I'll be chasing the high of solving that puzzle for a long time. It was the same kind of high I got when I solved the mysterious "grumble grumble" in Zelda 1.
Puzzle-solving and general world understanding and traversal (geometry tricks aside) are also beautifully aided through the use of the in-game instruction booklet, which you reassemble throughout your adventure. It was an immense pleasure putting it together and reminded me of the many, many times I would sit and read the booklet for a game I had received as a gift before I would take that knowledge into playing that game for the first time.
The booklet became a constant companion and made me equal parts regretful and grateful that I didn't have a physical copy of the booklet. Regretful, because it would have been so nice to have the booklet's maps open in front of me while playing. Grateful, because the order in which pages are recovered is just as much part of the game's story as the story itself is. This is TUNIC's masterstroke.
But I will walk away from this game always feeling a bit sour that it wasn't exactly what I was hoping it would be. Or what I expected it to be based on the opinions of others. I don't want to pretend that it's my favorite game ever or that it's a perfect melding of...whatever. At the same time, I don't want to feel like my opinion is "wrong" and that my thoughts will be deemed incomplete, lesser, ill-conceived because the end result of them is not in consensus with "people with good taste."
If I take anything away from TUNIC, it's to limit how much I expose myself to the conversations about a piece of art before I sample that art myself, and maybe try to feel a little more confident in building my own opinions.
Maybe someday I'll have good taste. But TUNIC's flavors aren't quite what I was looking for.
★★★☆☆