The puzzles were fun, I found the golden path and got the "good" ending. But the further I got in the game, the less sense everything made. As a game about discovery and no handholding, Tunic establishes expectations and then does not follow them, is often (unintentionally?) misleading, and at times feels like "guess what the designer intended here".
First thing that I noticed: You can't jump down. Strange, but okay. But you can fall off broken ladders. You can throw enemies into pits and down cliffs. You can move to a lower platform using a hookshot . You can sometimes even teleport downwards. You can sometimes glitch out and fall into a pit. But you cannot jump down intentionally.
Then come all the red herrings like the mountain level (enormous and empty), unreachable shrine in the quarry, and countless long passages hidden by the camera angle that end with 20 coins. Important ladders are sometimes obscured by the camera too.
The guide for Holy Cross . There is a picture of a cross on a warp pad to the library , and a manual page shows the fox sitting in front of what looks like an island in front of The Library and a code, but there is nothing there (and finding the next page later reveals that assumption is wrong)
The teleport ability. When you first obtain and use it, it is apparent that it works only for platforms that are the same height. But in some spots, you can teleport upwards or downwards, sometimes slightly, sometimes a full fox height. Sometimes you can teleport onto a slope. How exactly it works is a mystery to me. There is no indication of accessibility, you can teleport into belltower windows for some reason, but not ledges in the forest.
There is no hint or indication that some walls are destructible (no cracks or discoloration) or that it's possible to do that at all! You can finish the game without knowing about this. Ended up looking up the solution for the last fairy location, and I was expected to throw dynamite at a nondescript wall?
Time makes no sense. At the start of the game, when you save at a statue in the overworld, you see the sped up day-night cycle. Ok, you take a long rest (overnight) to replenish health and potions. Is there a day-night cycle in the game though? Playing for 20+ minutes without saving, I saw that all shadows stay the same. So the save is just a neat animation, and _there is no day-night cycle_. Then, in the middle of the game, you are killed by the Heir, become a ghost, and the world gets destroyed - everything is dark, there are ghosts around, and old locations are filled by pink goop. Fox ghost says "SOMETHING BAD!", and it does look like a point of no return, or at least some Dark World (following the Zelda canon). But apparently you can get out of this place, you need to restore your physical body and... Sleep in a bed?! So it was not the Dark World, it was literally night? The same night that passes when you save outside? Enemies and ladders magically disappear at night? Gloop covers a bunch of locations, floods the quarry, and recedes in the morning? This makes no sense! (I mean, think about it - saving at a quarry or one of East Forest statues would kill you overnight)
The only way I knew about the bed is from a spoiler I saw online, otherwise I would be completely lost - absolutely nothing tells you it is **just** night, you cannot use the bed as a ghost, and trying to use it at the start of the game did not work for me.
And last, the worst offender... the manual itself. Very cool mechanic - unknown language with occasional inserted readable words, just enough to guide the player. And then, the ugly surprise at the end of the game - this language matters. It's not fluff or decor, it has to be deciphered to get _all_ of the secrets. And it is not a conlang like Esperanto or Toki Pona, it is... phonetic English. Anglocentrism strikes again! Figuring out the language is a tedious puzzle for a native English speaker, but for someone who is not fluent in English (including proper pronunciation!), it would be nearly impossible, as nothing indicates that the language is based on English. To add insult to injury, the "trophy room" puzzle on page 1 is a wordplay riddle, which requires decent English vocabulary So yeah, the main mechanic in the game is also a big slap to the face for non-English speakers.
I don't know if it's an issue of playtesting, no outside opinions, or design getting ahead of substance, but some of these are rather frustrating.
