Board 8 > At the endgame (I think) for Tunic... *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

Why did this become a different game all of a sudden? Everything up until now was Zelda + Dark Souls with a healthy seasoning of cool 'eureka moments'. I was really enjoying it.

Now the puzzles have become significantly more esoteric and they all amount to long, finicky D-pad patterns. I've been trying them as I'm pretty sure the true ending is going to be locked behind them, and it hasn't been very fun. I recognize that for some people they're probably amazing, but for me it's honestly knocked the game score down from a 9/10 to an 8.

Yeah Tunic kinda fizzles out at the end, though I still enjoyed... some of the d-pad stuff.

Yeah the puzzles definitely get too hard in the endgame.

I feel like there's a good satisfying stopping point before they get too hard though!! The hard part is, knowing where that stopping point is...

It's a shame because I love the final upgrade. It exceeded my expectations - I was anticipating something like the Roc's Feather from Link's Awakening, not an instant long-range teleportation dash. Made re-exploring the world and collecting your stats back a lot of fun.

Then the D-pad puzzles are just eeeeeh.

Epyo posted...

Yeah the puzzles definitely get too hard in the endgame.

I feel like there's a good satisfying stopping point before they get too hard though!! The hard part is, knowing where that stopping point is...

I feel like there's a very clear stopping point but YMMV on whether it's too hard. Everything after that stopping point is like, legitimately for crazy people though.

Also, this is a side note but combat was generally more fun before I got the grapple whip thing. Nearly every non-boss enemy in the game can be trivialized by repeatedly yanking them into your sword. Boss fights have been great though.

I like the puzzles but I do think it's a shame that the ratio of puzzle to combat flips so massively.

There needed to be a way to automate the inputs. It was definitely not fun at that point.

KamikazePotato posted...

It's a shame because I love the final upgrade. It exceeded my expectations - I was anticipating something like the Roc's Feather from Link's Awakening, not an instant long-range teleportation dash. Made re-exploring the world and collecting your stats back a lot of fun.

Then the D-pad puzzles are just eeeeeh.

I got to the part where you lose your stats and my motivation to keep playing disappeared right along with them

See, I was the exact opposite: I loved the instruction manual in Tunic but the combat in the game was really getting me down for a while and I was struggling to find motivation to play through a lot of the game, but then I hit the puzzle-heavy second half of the game and it was GO TIME baby, I LOVED that part and everything about it

Yeah people tend to be turned off by one of Tunic's combat or puzzles, neither are basic enough for those not interested in that side of the game. I liked both but preferred the puzzles, drawing out some pictures of the endgame puzzles to help me was a blast! Some of the optional side stuff was too esoteric for my liking, but I'm fine not doing that if it's got no connection to the main story.

The instruction manual is one of my fav mechanics in games in a long time, Tunic came the closest to making me feel like Outer Wilds did. But I completely get people being down on it.

I loved the instruction booklet until these endgame puzzles.

My wish for the game is still that the boss fights had some kind of exploitable weakness you could figure out, OR that the items had some kind of secret way to use them to make them more powerful, OR that the cards were more powerful if you understood how they worked, or all three. The fact that you can't really 'solve' the game's difficult boss fights through puzzling makes me kinda sad - I'd like to be able to solve them with good combat OR with puzzle solving. By the same token, though, I do wish that the game had a sort of 'final' area to fight through after you've powered yourself all the way up. It's an indie game made by a really small team, so I can't fault them for not having more content, but it does feel like it needs something at the end.

Have you tried Death's Door? It's Tunic-ish but with less focus on puzzles.

I hated the combat basically throughout, but when the decided to make it hard it really ruined the game. Still, it was a small part of the game. It's definitely puzzle forward after the first couple good.

I also think the golden door puzzles are pretty meh. But they're purely optional for people who really wanted more from the game. It's totally ok to just not do it.

Paratroopa1 posted...

My wish for the game is still that the boss fights had some kind of exploitable weakness you could figure out, OR that the items had some kind of secret way to use them to make them more powerful, OR that the cards were more powerful if you understood how they worked, or all three.

I wouldn't have liked any of this, but I also thought the game had a great balance between combat and puzzling for most of it, and didn't want the scales tipped on any specific direction.

I liked the puzzles more than the godawful boss fights.