Tunic

I've had a hard time getting into indie games that are trying to be Zelda or Metroid, as even when they're well-made and pretty they tend to be missing a certain something (level design I suspect, they all come off like first draft levels). I can at least say that Tunic did not fall into the pit of me sighing and stopping after a few hours- I played it to the end. It evokes Zelda with the titular outfit of its protagonist, and I suppose it's not a completely inaccurate comparison. Just, like, replace Zelda's combat with something a bit slower (it's trying to be Souls given the in-game references to Dark Souls, but in practice you mostly just mash after seeing an opening- the enemy design is about as mundane as an Ubisoft game) and replace Zelda's eclectic variety of puzzles with one primary puzzle revolving around hiding things behind perspective (you know how old RPGs had you rubbing against walls to find secret doors? It's like that, but actually cool because there are visual cues). 

It also uses the experience of playing a video game in a language you can't read as an intentional mechanic. You see, there's an in-game manual that unlocks as you play. But it's made up of a mix of about 10% English and 90% fictional language. Most the the text in the game itself is also in this language that you can't read. As someone who has dabbled in Japanese-exclusive games it's, uh, pretty authentic (as they also feature confounding random instances of English). This aspect was the main thing that sold me on the game. And while it takes way longer to utilize it than I wanted, it does end up leveraging it to a satisfying degree.

(Minor spoilers for the rest of the review. Though personally I would have been happier with the game if someone told me about it ahead of time so. There's that.)

Like every other indie game on the planet, it does end up taking a bit of a genre shift to something akin to an adventure game. This part is in a lot of ways the best part of the game, but also kind of the worst. Without saying too much, the primary mechanic involved makes it hard to tell whether you executed the solution wrong or straight up had entirely the wrong solution. The execution is also lengthy enough that retrying it is quite annoying. I ended up basically referring to guides to see whether my answer was wrong or my input was wrong, and most of the time it was the input. It smoothed over the experience a lot, but also resulted in me spoiling things for myself at times. I... would probably still recommend doing so, as it's maddening otherwise. 

I somewhat question the shift itself too, since separating it from the rest of the game ends up leaving you with just one flavor of game at a time rather than how genuine Zelda mixes genres to create a balance. It also left me with a very strong longing for the game to do more with the manual gimmick for most of the game, only for it to suddenly become a lot more useful than just "where to go next" at the last moment. To  be fair, the split also allows the game to be way more convenient about traversal once it hits full-on adventure game time so I can't totally fault the structure.

So should you play Tunic? I dunno. I guess if you want an indie action adventure that's just pretty good. It has a some stand out moments, but also has quite a few average elements. Fact of the matter is that we've seen these ideas explored several times by now: Ni No Kuni 1 and Retro Game Challenge among others have explored the game manual renaissance, Fez explored deep secrets inside games, and genre shifting is practically its own genre at this point. Tunic takes some of these further than its peers, and one of the puzzles in it is probably one of the best times I've ever had taking notes in a game. But the good bits have flaws, and it's a tad average on the whole. So I'm left unsure of it, but I guess I'm glad I played it.

Elden Ring

In a few years when you look up Elden Ring in a dictionary it's just going to say "too much of a good thing". It's not even like Dark Souls where you can simply say the last chunk of the game is blatantly unfinished and that's why it's bad. Elden Ring's final dozens of hours are about as well made as the first. But they're also not particularly distinct from the rest of the game, either. So you simply end up tired and exhausted of the formula.

I wanted the introduction to be about how the long wait for a game that actually paid attention to 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was finally over (as every open world game since has simply ignored it- even games like Horizon: Forbidden West that doesn't even have the excuse of being in development before seeing it- its preceding game literally released along side Zelda. Most developers straight up don't seem to give a shit for whatever reason, or they get confused and think the climbing around was the rad part of Zelda). As sick of it as I am, it's still true. Elden Ring does a pretty good job cleaning up the open world genre's obsession with not letting the player discover anything for themselves by having fairly minimal information. While most landmarks can be identified by visually looking at the map (some of which you only learn to identify with time making even reading the map a bit of an adventure), the game still hides a plethora of secret items, dungeons, and world bosses. Heck, the original release didn't even put NPCs on your map (which I liked but also made the limit of 100 map markers far too harsh for me) and even the size of the world is hidden from you for most of the game. To find them you have to actually look at the actual world. Surprisingly closely at times, often only barely identifying a cave by a flame masked behind tree branches. It's pretty cool, though it dries up a bit near the end as areas start to feel more like palette swaps with few secrets.

The game more or less copies the systems of previous Souls games into an open world (even outside the systems, it also copies a lot of level concepts and monsters almost directly from them as well. There are downsides to this, but it's also really smart in terms of letting them have a higher amount of variety than most open world games by virtue of gluing together several old games. They do a passable job of covering it up with minor tweaks, too. The only problem is the game is still so long that even with gluing multiple games together it ends up with an excessive number of repeat bosses and other monsters). But these systems were built for 40-60 hour long dungeon crawlers. When you try copy them into a 200 hour open world behemoth, they start to crack. While getting a lot of equipment and spells that aren't relevant to your build is annoying in a traditional Souls, it becomes more deflating in Elden Ring when that's your reward for tackling an entire micro dungeon (as opposed to finding a hidden corner). Worse, they carry over the upgrade systems from those games which require using limited items to upgrade equipment. This makes it really hard to even try the new things you're finding. While systems do exist to eventually get infinite amounts of most upgrades, they lag behind in a way that disincentivizes you from ever breaking from what you already have. They mitigate it somewhat by also letting you find things to change your existing weapon's properties, but it still makes all the other stuff you're finding underwhelming. 

Then there are the game's quests. I was initially pretty excited about them, keeping a notepad and screenshot button handy, as warned by the Internet. They more or less directly copy the structure of other Souls game quests: find an NPC at a point and do what's required, then they move on to another point in the world (sometimes with dialog clues as to where), and so on until the end, with no map hints as to where they went. This works well enough in the other games because they have a relatively linear, tight structure (though even then I'd tend to miss some of them, but not so many that I felt like I was missing much). When you transport this into Elden Ring's massive world, with a structure that allows quite a few different orders, with almost no changes it doesn't go so well (to be fair- some quests have optional steps and they do have NPCs shout at you when near a step). They're even worse if you miss a quest step because you end up with a needle in a haystack situation for deriving where the next quest step is in the miles and miles of areas you've already cleared out.

I screwed up almost every quest in the game despite my best attempts at being meticulous. At the end of the game I did end up looking them up out of curiosity. Generally speaking, the bigger side quests were mostly just my own fault for missing hidden areas or not spending enough time roaming around gigantic, empty boss arenas. Some of the smaller side quests involve such a specific order in areas with numerous possible orders of visiting that uh. Yeah good luck with those. I dunno how I feel about it. I still think the quest pointers that dominate games are horrible for games about exploration. And I have friends who missed similar things as me, and I know friends who managed to complete quite a few quests without help, so I can't say they're outright impossible. All I know is that in a game that is so much more about exploration than others in the series, I found it so much more distressing to be missing them than I did in the other games. I don't know the solution to the problem, though. I'm glad they took a swing at doing things the hard way and I hope they find the solution in the future.

There's a lot more that could be talked about such as the nuanced differences in combat (I have forgotten them), boss design / spirit summoning system (bosses are hyper aggressive with a lot of variations in attack patterns such that they feel built to force you to use summons. I found the summon system pretty fun in figuring out the best ones to use against different types of bosses. Then you find the Broken Summon and almost never care again- I was lucky in that I didn't find it until the end of the game, but most people aren't. It's a real shame. The upgrade system also hurts the system by limiting viable ones to experiment with), and how introducing a guest writer for the background story changes the things (more than you might expect at first, but also not that much). I'm just exhausted of it.

So should you play Elden Ring? Yeah probably, it's still one of the best open world games ever made (despite the dour tone of this review, the first 80 hours were incredible and I could not stop playing, and it's basically the RPG I've been yearning for all my life but never got because things like The Elder Scrolls have garbage combat I can't get into or The Witcher 3's non-existence balancing), but also in doing so you're cursing yourself with a game that outlives its welcome without giving you much reason to kick it out. It basically made me hate all video games for a month. I can't even say "oh just skip half the side content" (which is my typical strategy for open world games), because the game mixes in really cool stuff in secret places. That's its greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness.