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Tunic This game is a really hard game to rate. A lot of what it does it does really, really well, and is really cool, but there's other stuff where it just falls flat on its face, and I don't know how the two balance out. First, the good. This game is charming as fuck, probably one of the prettiest games I've ever played. It's going for the feeling of an old-school Zelda (but without the pixel art) and nails it. It also feels really good to play, keeping the tough feel of those old games while still managing to be very fast and responsive. The most standout thing though is the instruction manual. Throughout the game you find pages of an old style instruction manual, complete with handwritten notes in pen the previous player made. The manual is mostly written in an unknown runic language, but gives you hints to mechanics and what you should be working on. It's a very cool concept, and really well done. The levels are also very smartly designed, with lots of interconnectedness in ways that isn't obvious until you've been through it and come out somewhere and suddenly realize there's a hidden passage where you could have gone in through if you'd only known it was there. It's really neat and well thought out. That's actually a theme throughout the game, the game is gated primarily through information given to the player, and not through actually restricting what you're capable of. For instance, with the fast travel system (no spoilers), you could have been making use of it from the start, but you don't know to until you get the appropriate manual page that tells you what to do, then you realize you've been seeing the fast travel stations everywhere. Like everything else, it's super clever. Which brings me to the negatives: sometimes the game goes past clever and falls over into obtuse. I ended up using a guide at the end, because even with the manual I don't see how I was supposed to have figured some of this stuff out. Also, a couple of the boss fights I don't understand how they're supposed to be possible without using the game's no-fail mode. One in particular that is a flying boss in a game where you don't really have good access to ranged attacks. It's great that there's a no-fail setting in the accessibility menu, but sometimes I think the game used it as too much of a crutch. (A more minor but related complaint: I wish it weren't all or nothing with no-fail either on or off, I wish there were ways to scale damage taken or something, but alas, there is not). There's also a large area toward the end with a really irritating design aspect that I won't spoil here. Again, no-fail mode saves it a to some extent, but that shouldn't be necessary. I'm just left asking, who thought this was a good idea? All in all, I really like this game, and do highly recommend it, just with the caveat that you may need to use no-fail to get through some parts, or a guide to figure out what you need to be doing next. It's a really special game, and is really good, but with a couple minor tweaks I feel like it could have been truly spectacular. Grade: B+ but with a

I just love seeing the crazy builds people come up with.