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.