alarmingly large glaceon girl 🍓me
"and the faithful were granted the gra... grass... grace of hooly... holy.. ub... ub... ubli... ublivi... oblivionTHE FAITHFUL WERE ALLOWED TO DIE??"
okay i read all the lore stuff in the manual i could find
wild
they found a source of power that could be used to defy death, they abused it too hard and broke a hole in their story (the "canonical plane")
the narrative thread looped back into itself, no beginning or end, just a cycle that repeats forever
this is the "bad end"; it's not really an ending, nothing has changed, everything is back in the same position it was in before you ever booted up the game; you are the heir and the beacon has been lit to attract a new ruin seeker, an heir-to-the-heir
the only way to break the curse would be for a ruin seeker to ("by some miracle") invoke a relic from beyond this plane, the holy cross, and traverse the golden path.
"Wisdom that is untempered by kindness is no wisdom at all."
that shit goes fuckin hard
i tried to do all my puzzle solving in a way that i could have done if i had been playing on a retro console with a paper manual. like, i tried to do everything in-game as much as possible, but i allowed myself to take screenshots of the manual and rotate the screenshots, since i could have held a paper manual any way i wanted
i did give up on this once, doing something i couldn't have done on a SNES game or whatever. but it was something i could have done with a SNES game and a VCR, so it's not so bad
(was trying to note down something that kept moving in a confusing way, and wasn't all visible at once. i tried to just take notes in real time, but it was too hard to keep up. i tried pausing the game but the pause menu obstructed what i needed to see. eventually i just gave up and took screenshots at key moments, noting down what i needed from the screenshots. equivalent to recording a cycle of it onto VHS and then playing it back and pausing)
there's this feeling of like
almost catharsis
of seeing people struggle with the garden knight. like it's a very hard boss for that point in the game, genuinely. that's a hell of a difficulty spike. i stopped playing for like three months because i couldn't beat the garden knight
but i've since slain two of them (notably powered down and abusing a weapon i didn't have at the time, but still). i've taken down the siege engine. and... it may not have been my smoothest moment in retrospect, but i took down the heir
so when my friends hit a hard wall there it's almost like. a reminder of how far i've come? i remember feeling that way but i've since done so much more. and at the same time, i'm excited for them to one day look back and go "i was that stuck on garden knight?"
i didn't play tunic for the combat. if the game was about the combat, i wouldn't have finished it
despite that, the combat is quite fun. not the main draw of the game, couldn't support the game on its own, but still rock solid
by the way my strategy for the two garden knights in the cathedral basement was "point blank one of them with the fuckin sawed-off a couple times, then compose myself while waiting for the second one to spawn"
so it's a little rich to say i've "slain two of them" because i abused a strong weapon to wipe the first off the map and then took the second on normally. but at the same time, that was all my mana, leaving me with just a sword for the second knight
iirc i got some use out of the inverted ash card for that room; i needed mana for the fairies and the garden knights so i had to use a potion for mana before the refill
i tried to abuse inverted ash for the heir fight once or twice; if you have any mana at all you can use any magic item at least once, so i tried to cheese her by hitting her with the gun until i was out of mana, taking a potion to refill a little bit, refilling again, etc etc
i don't think it'd get you there even if you didn't take any hits
it's funny that we seem to have had like, exactly the opposite amount of trouble with the guardians of the keys than our friends did
i struggled HARD with the siege engine. a friend told us a strategy we should use that "makes it almost difficult to lose" but for me, that made the fight feel sort of possible. far from easy. still bashed my head into it for quite a while
then later i fought the librarian and went "wow i wish i found the librarian before the siege engine. that seems like a much more reasonable difficulty curve" and was surprised to learn that my friends found the librarian harder than the siege engine. not a trivial fight by any means but the attacks felt well telegraphed and i found a lot of opportunities to get in. on my first attempt i got them below half health, while on my first siege engine attempt i think i literally got one hit in
and then, the last key holder. the one in the quarry. our friend was excited to watch because they wanted that "watching someone struggle with something i struggled with" catharsis like i was talking about. they kept talking about how hard this fight is, how they had to be so careful with their resources and it took so many tries
i'm calling them "the last key holder" because i don't remember their name. it only appeared once because amy walked into the room for the first time, killed them, and walked out
the quarry was a really fun area. (btw i'm including the factory area under the name "quarry" because i don't remember if it has its own name, i'm not in front of the game at the moment)
our friend who was watching complimented us on our combat strategy, which felt really good haha. like "yeah we understand the game enough to use our abilities usefully and in non-obvious ways"
(they said they took the turrets on with tiptoes and heavy shield use. we discovered that, since they're rooted into the ground, the magic orb pulls you to them like the tuning forks they leave behind. we'd wait for a safe moment and grapple onto them, giving us enough time to whale with the sword)
by the way, i'm SURE there's more magic orb lore. the item description in the manual says you "rotate it around the forbidden axis" and "partially summon" some kind of entity. truly fucked explanation for what just plays like a hookshot
my first thought was that it was a play on metanarrative, "this is an old video game" stuff. like the paper manual, the CRT phosphor motif, "invoking a relic from another plane" via the "holy cross", etc
like the idea was "the game is 2d, to rotate into the third dimension violates the conventions of the world and lets something else in"
this thought did not last very long, as i immediately remembered that the game is not 2d
i'm actually not sure if the crt phosphor motif is intentional. like the RGB colours, absolutely that's the joke. they're nice bright colours that make sense to use anyway, but in the context of tunic i'm sure that "subpixel values" was the joke
but the way that they're always laid out, that triangle of hexagon patterns... i don't know if it has any actual relation but it's at least REMINISCENT of the phosphor pattern that gives colour CRTs their colour. that could be a coincidence but i like to think it's not
anyway, some general plot thinking:
it's interesting to me that it very much doesn't seem like the world is in a time loop. it's in a narrative loop. they broke a hole in their story and the plot thread has twisted itself together
which has some implications. like, it seems that the remaining civilization is desperate to end the loop, to prevent any ruin seeker from ever again defeating the heir. one of the ghosts is face down, seemingly sobbing outside the arena where you fight the siege engine. "why... the siege engine wasn't enough... why why why..."
it's SO important to them that ruin seekers are killed off before they can perpetuate the cycle. if it was a time loop, i'd get it, but if it's just history repeating itself... i genuinely couldn't tell you why. i don't know what the consequences of being in the loop are. the first thought i had was "well it's a cycle of senseless violence that accomplishes nothing, of course they'd want to stop it" but it's not like killing off ruin seekers is any less violent, and they're doing some even worse shit to the previous heirs
if it was some kind of attempt to break the cycle, that'd be something, but afaik it's not. they want to stay in this iteration of the loop forever
i'm not sure whether to believe that all the purple magic goop stuff (and the tech powered by it) is new, developed in an attempt to stop ruin seekers, or if it's the power referenced in the backstory that they abused too hard
because tbh it seems like it would make more sense as the former, if they run their tech off of the energy of previous heirs, but it seems to be integrated pretty seamlessly into the cathedral, like it was there when it was built
another thing i've been thinking about from the backstory is what exactly the great power or whatever, the "lever", did
my current shot-in-the-dark interpretation is that it allowed them to like, deviate from their story? by which i mean stuff like
- "the faithful were allowed the grace of holy oblivion"
game characters can't like, just die. they can die as part of the narrative but you'll never boot up mario one day and find out that toad suffered a cardiac arrest and just passed away so he won't be appearing in the game
so is that the idea? they were allowing functionally immortal characters to die? and doing that strained the narrative?
- after shit goes to hell, there's a line about telling people to head for the arks, and return to their predestined roles (or something)
i think there's a good chance that this is some clever wordplay. you're primed by apocalypse stories to read it as people fleeing into arks, but the language is phonetic. what if it's arcs? desperately trying to fix the story by returning to their "predestined roles", the stuff that they were always supposed to have been doing as NPCs, to maintain the narrative arcs? kind of a stretch but i think it could work. we know they're familiar with the narrative, they call their reality the canonical plane
i don't know what to make of the ghosts. first thought was previous ruin seekers, but previous ruin seekers end up as heirs. are they the people who used to live here? what exactly happened to them?
also speaking of the language being phonetic
there's a part of the manual where a word is circled with two question marks next to it, like the last person who was trying to read it got confused
"The sound of chanting in the (air)" ??
i like to think it was "why is it talking about the heir here"
i think i'm just about done with tunic c: really good game
i will say that i gave up on a couple of puzzles and googled it and... yeah, no regrets. i'm glad i didn't spend more time on them i think i'd have been disappointed
The Dog AlsoI'm guessing one of them was the cryptic crossword clue that was page 1's secret?
@Inumo yeah
i thought "corrected" was a typo and assumed it was supposed to be "corrupted", but even knowing what it's supposed to be i can't think of an accent that you'd spell it that way for
and like, even after i had the wordplay explained, i still couldn't solve the puzzle because they expected me to read "once more" as "one more time than the last thing" instead of. "once"
revealing the puzzle on page 1 by standing in the water was awesome. actually solving the puzzle was moon logic
i was stuck on one of the fairies and it turned out the answer was "have you tried just bombing every wall". thanks
getting the statue in the lower forest was almost a cool puzzle i just think that they really should have drawn a better ice dagger. like even knowing that it's supposed to be the ice dagger, i can't really see it
aand the whole mini-arg thing. idk. there were a couple ways to interpret the "unsing the golden path from within" clue and i was trying o bunch of different permutations of them. there's one that generates only valid glyphs, and it's wrong. there's one that generates a circle on its own, which isn't used anywhere else, and that was right, but i dismissed it out of hand and tried something else. and then i would never have put it into a spectrogram
honestly, solving trunic (which i have now learned that players call it and i ADORE) felt like a great "big secret with huge payoff", anything that came after that was gravy
Julie SqveakarooThey're good loops, Brint...