I tried to run this GOG version of the game the first time ever recently, and I'm getting the typical running about 5 FPS on a modern system problem. I even downloaded the unofficial patch mentioned being on Zomb's Lair, and that did not make it fully tolerable. There was still a major issue when moving my mouse. The more I moved the mouse, the more and more the game seemed to just stall and have to play catch up, dropping all frames entirely for seconds at a time. So given all that, I'm doubling down joining the 1 star rating on modern systems club. GOG has a statement here, https://www.gog.com/about_gog, about making old games run flawlessly on modern systems. So sorry, high star reviewers like Apocalypse2001, I don't care what this game ran like when it was new in 1999 on systems back then. Or how good the gameplay might be when it does run fine somewhere sometime on some system, because GOG is selling it for real money today, advertising flawless operation on modern systems, and this game is failing to do so even with an unofficial patch that I should not have to be using for this version of the game. This isn't like a 40 year old book that can be read fine today if kept in good condition, or even a DVD that still works on my PS4 and HDMI monitor. This is a product that must operate properly to be of value, and at least for many, this version is not operating on modern systems as advertised by GOG while asking for your money today.
Some of Tunic is like Zelda 1 and ALttP had a baby, who grew up and had a baby with Dark Souls, and that child found a child safe fox furry TF potion before going on their own adventure. It has the necessary but incomplete manual feeling well known in the NES days. Partially filled out data, personal notes, and huge gaps of incomplete information. A lot of mystery and exploration of the items, gear, and not just the map. But it has more depth of design and control found in something like the N64 days. You can move in many directions, dodge roll, your attacks are not super rigid like Zelda 1, but more like OoT. And it feels like a Souls-lite game with a bonfire and flask system, punishing but generally fair combat, and bosses with like 20 times your health, but doesn't feel as severe of "make a mistake and youw will die." And then it has this mild meta horror feeling, a slightly creepy one, with how the in game manual puts the "actual game" in the background on CRT TV screen, complemented by an increasingly creepy atmosphere later on. But finally, eventually, you find some of its flaws. One critical one that stumped me, the ladder into the southern area. Hidden so well behind the 3D isometric view, with only the tip top barely visible and blending in with the ground so well, I spent hours stuck unable to progress. Other minor issues: * if you complete the manual, you lose access to the main boss * golden path puzzles get obtuse, espeically the clue of rotating light from a cave pond onto the walls * once you understand each golden path puzzle, just go look up the solution to avoid input mistakes * sometimes the isometric view is clever hiding sequence breaks, somtimes it's just plain obnoxious In the end, it reminds me why Nintendo never fully duplicated Zelda 1. Not even Breath of the Wild, the trend bucker reliving Zelda 1 days, has secrets so excessively hidden as its ancestor. Tunic is definitely great, but a tiny bit too much of a link to the past.
I was wondering what exactly I thought about this game. But now it's definitely no more than 3 stars, because I lost a week of in game time building myself into a softlock between a zombie garden and three pole plots. This is because a combination of you can't remove built objects unless you can reach the crafting bench, the pole plots have a very solid square shaped zone you can't cross, and the zombie garden's top left and top right squares (out of 3x3) are easier to move around before building them. Once you build them, they'e a full sized impassible square. And if you stand in the top middle of the zombie garden, finish building all it's parts from there, and have a 3x1 row of pole plots immeidately above it, you can cause this softlock. And the reason I lost an in game week was because I was using food to supplment bothering to go to bed to sleep to restore energy. And you get one guess as to when is the only time this game saves. You could say "but Harvest Moon/Stardew are like that," but I'd reply that those games also have a much more day by day nature. This game gives you the freedom to run around as much as you want, and if you have the food and put up with the tiredness debuff, you potentially never have to sleep. They also clearly wanted a mild alchemy system where you experiment with combinations until you find workings ones, but only successful combinations are tracked. The 2nd tier station also expects you to combine 3 items each time. Combined with how rare some are earlier on, they don't explain nearly every useful combination always starts with a power very explicity on the left input, then a fluid, then a second fluid on the tier 2. Like so many other alchemy systems, you feel more punished for experimentation than rewarded for not going to the wiki. There's also a mild issue of game stuttering every so many seconds, and I've got a decent gaming PC where this is not happening in other similar or more complex games.
