4/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Tunic.

Tunic is a beautiful, cute and extremely challenging adventure game. It is presented in an isometric top-down view, and adopts many of the trademark mechanics of metroidvanias and souls games, e.g. • Enemies that respawn when you die • Areas you often cannot explore until you discover a tool or ability later in the game • Boss fights • Specific respawn locations, requiring you to fight your way back to your last position if you die • Loss of items if you die and don’t recover your old body location • A story that doesn’t make any sense 😂 So from that perspective, it delivers fairly well and consistently. I knew what I was in for, and that is what I got! What I thought it did especially well was to hide areas in plain sight. Often if you went into a hidden corner, the isometric view would rotate 45 degrees and you’d discover a whole new area or secret path. This was really satisfying and always kept me exploring every nook and cranny of the map. The other element that I, along with everyone else, loved was the in-game booklet. as you progress through the game, you uncover additional pages of an in-game booklet, with each new page teaching you something new. Often this led you to be able to progress further into the game simply by accumulating additional knowledge. I.e. things you could have always done but you just didn’t know about, a.k.a. The Witness. This is always a nice touch and it was done really well. The puzzles became increasingly complex and eventually i had to start Googling things - some of them I never would have figured out. It didn’t give me the feels in the way Hollow Knight did, but I enjoyed it. And that’s all I have to say about it I think!