Episode 159 - Frog Zone - Tunic

Use the Holy Pod to follow the Golden Cast Welcome back to the
podcast! Today, we’re talking about Tunic, a game styled very much
after the classic 2D Zelda titles, but with some other influences
that will become apparent as you play through the game. Tunic is a
colorful, cute game, with a fox wearing a shirt as a protagonist
and bushes that squish and bounce when you cut them down. This
seems to be to lure you into a false sense of security because the
game itself is actually much more difficult than its aesthetics
would lead you to believe. The combat in this game is simple in
terms of your actions, but has depth in execution. Regular enemies
can pose a threat early on, some much more than others, but the
bosses of the game are all tests of your abilities. Beyond that,
the game primarily focuses around navigation puzzles and
exploration, rewarding the player with upgrades and items they can
use to get stronger, make fights easier or open up further paths
for traversal. And you can’t forget what is essentially the selling
feature of the game, the instruction manual. There is a booklet
programmed into the game itself that you pick up pages from over
the course of your adventure. The book mostly isn’t written in a
readable language (though it can be deciphered with some
dedication), but it gives hints on everything from what you should
be doing to how to perform basic actions like the dodge roll,
explaining invincibility frames, and what the different parts of
the UI mean. Collecting pieces of this manual is a driving force
for a lot of reasons, and we’ll get into all the things it means
for the experience in the episode. We’ll also be talking about the
accessibility of certain features and how much the average player
should be accommodated, the ups and downs of the combat and our
experience with the bosses, and Dark Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls.
Thank you for listening to the podcast again today! This one was
always going to happen eventually, and now that it’s done we’re
left with some complicated feelings, but this game is genuinely
incredible in a lot of ways. How did you get along with Tunic? Was
the difficulty on par with what you look for in games, or were you
taken aback by the level of challenge? Were you able to solve the
end game puzzles or did you leave that for the more
cryptographically-minded out there? Let us know down in the
comments, or over on our Discord (where you can also suggest games
for us to play)! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Super
Mario Wonder, the newest Mario platformer, so we hope you’ll join
us for that.