Tunic Sucks, Don’t Buy It

Have you played with this Human Benchmark website? The idea is it can measure your reaction time, within the bounds of your monitor’s refresh rate. You wait until the screen turns green, and then click as fast as you can. The website takes your average over five clicks and calls that your reaction time, in milliseconds.

Human Benchmark website

The website claims the aveerage reaction time is about 270ms, and there’s some interesting data that suggests that time is getting slightly slower over time due to people migrating from CRT displays to HD monitors or cell phones. 270ms is about a quarter second, which smooths out with other sources I’ve checked (boring medical journals and peer-reviewed experiments and what-have-you). I’ve “played” the Human Benchmark site probably a hundred times in a past week, clicking five times and taking the average, and my reaction time hovers around 450ms — way out at the front of the bell curve.

Anyway, I ended up hating Tunic. It was a waste of my $30 and it’s been many years since I’ve been this angry about a gaming experience.

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Dark Souls Ruined Gaming Forever

I’m not allowed to play Dark Souls. I characterise it as “not allowed to play” and not “do not like” because I am convinced that if I were allowed to play, I would find myself utterly engrossed in the world and the lore and the combat systems. I think I would really enjoy hunting down secrets and correlating clues and dying in hilarious ways while trying to roll off a moving elevator into a broken window, or whatever. I think I would have a lot of fun on replays, trying out different builds or weapon sets.

But my reaction time is 450ms and not 270ms. By the time my brain has received the signal from my eyeballs that the boss is attacking, and has sent the signal to my thumbs to dodge roll out of the way, it’s already too late and my character in the game has already sustained damage. The fights in Dark Souls (and its sequels, and its spiritual sequels, and its clones and hangers-on) are calibrated to be challenging to someone with average reaction time, and I am far below that. The game’s developers have been very consistent in their philosophy that the games are supposed to deliver a singular, explicit gaming experience, the sort of thing that would be ruined if they included difficulty settings that slowed the bosses down or increased the amount of healing potions you can carry, or whatever. So my journey thorugh Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Hollow Knight ended when I reached a boss I could not defeat who bottlenecked my progress.

A permanent Game Over.

I don’t really want this post to veer off into a point-counterpoint of every argument I’ve had to respond to over the years, along the lines of “just practice more” or “just don’t play those games” or “the games are supposed to be hard, go back to Pokémon you loser”, or whatever. The point is, there is a physicality threshhold beyond which these games simply can’t be played. I can’t dunk a basketball, I can’t gestate a human fetus, and I can’t consistently dodge roll in Dark Souls. If you don’t want colorblind people to play your game, design your challenges so differentiating between shades of red and green is important to progress. If you don’t want deaf people to play your game, have lots of spoken dialogue but no subtitles. And if you don’t want me to play your game, make sure the required boss fights all rely on attacks that can’t be reacted to inside of 450ms. From a development perspective it’s pretty easy to build a wall to keep out the players you don’t want.

But the Dark Souls formula is so wildly popular, and so pervasive, that it’s more and more becoming the baseline for what combat in action/adventure games should feel like. It’s getting to the point where you can now purchase some other genre of game that looks appealing, and be blindsided with Dark Souls-style difficulty without knowing that’s what you were about to play, and being too far on the other side of Steam’s refund policy to do much about it.

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What Does It Feel Like To Have a 450ms Reaction Time?

Once or twice, I have gotten my time on the Human Benchmark website down below 300ms. That is, something more in line with what the average person can do. Here’s how I did it.

If you click the screen too early, the site doesn’t penalize you. It just politely goes “Too soon!” and lets you try again. It lets you try a hundred times in a row, if you want. So what I can do is try and anticipate when I thik the screen is going to change, and click. If I’m wrong, it’s no problem, because I just get Too-soon!’d. But if I guess right, and just happen to click just as the screen changes over, I get to record a ridiculously good time for that click. When I spend a few minutes clicking through the “Too soon!” messages, the site averages my guesses instead of my reactions.

I can do this in Dark Souls too. Instead of watching for the boss’s wind-up and then choosing the appropriate response, I can try and anticipate when the boss is going to attack and respond appropriately. If I guess right, I can avoid the damage just like an average player who is able to read the boss in the way the developers intended.

Unfortunately, in Dark Souls and its derivatives, if I guess wrong I don’t get to try again. Guessing wrong means taking damage, and you can only carry so much Estus.

I’ve heard many reports from hundreds of different sources about how good it feels to finally beat a tough boss in Dark Souls, which necessitates the player first learn the fight, and then execute the appropriate actions, through many repeated (and often grueling) deaths. The feeling of accomplishment is supposed to be exquisite, the final culmination of slowly getting better at the fight over time, until you’re able to put it all together and achieve something great.

But I can’t win these fights by slowly getting better over time. Whether I dodge an attack or not is a function of luck, not skill. For a given boss fight in Dark Souls I could, of course, learn the fight and then make as many educated guesses as possible. And, eventually, after enough resets, I will get a run where I guess right enough times in a row that I win the fight. I’ve done this in lots of action games over the years, including some of the opening fights in Dark Souls style games.

In my experience, the feeling isn’t one of accomplishment, but just relief. It’s not, “Sweet! I finally beat that boss! I can definitely feel myself getting better at this!” Rather, it’s, “Phew, I can finally stop resetting over and over and see some new content in this game now.”

In practice, even just trying to get enough lucky clicks on the Human Benchmark site is pretty tedious. And there, I get to try again right away, and not have to run back to the boss room from the checkpoint every single time.

In my epxerience, people don’t like to hear this explanation. After all, they eventually beat the boss after practicing for a while, so clearly I’m just lazy and give up too easily. I don’t have a good response to this sentiment, except to remind myself that empathy is hard and nobody likes to be told they’re wrong.

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Brick, Is This Post About Tunic Or What?

I thought Tunic was going to be in the ballpark of “hard Zelda.” I’ve been aching for a new Zelda experience ever since Breath of the Wild failed to deliver one. Blossom Tales was vapid and empty. The Tomb Raider games are good but not exactly scratching the same itch. I loved Link’s Awakening but, like, I played it back in 1978.

But Tunic looks almost exactly like Zelda. I learned the game had a strong emphasis on exploration and puzzle-solving, and that the hero (whose name is Tunic, maybe?) collected a grab bag of toys that increased her (his?) options in both movement and combat. I knew there was a dodge roll and a stamina bar, and those things are mainstays in Dark Souls, but lots of games have the same systems without being all Souls-y. Oh, and also I’d heard the game described as “Souls-y”, but I’ve also heard lots of games described that way that decidedly aren’t.

At worst, I figured Tunic would be somewhere on the level of superhero mode in some latter Zelda games. Like, I could complete a version of Link to the Past which limits you to three hearts and one bottle. I envisioned enemies getting tougher as I go, but also my combat options increasing as well, to the point where at the end I was fighting more with magic and tools than swordplay. Link Between Worlds did that. Remember Link Between Worlds? The last Zelda game to successfully Zelda?

And for the first few hours, that’s exactly the experience the game delivers. You are dropped onto an island with a stick and no shield and told, “Go fight a bunch of monsters that kill you in two hits.” The first area caused a lot of deaths but felt… hmm… I’ll go with, appropriately hostile. It’s supposed to be this hard at first because Tunic doesn’t have any equipment yet. Soon I’ll find a real sword and a shield and maybe a magic meter, and then it’ll be fine. And even if the game stays at this relative level of difficulty, that’s fine too, because it shows a good, smooth curve in difficulty level that accurately reflects the hero’s power level as she advances.

I died a lot, but I also figured out a lot of stuff, and anyway checkpoints and shortcuts are so plentiful you never really lose any progress. I’ve had Zelda Randomizer runs where I had to wade into an ocean of blue darknuts with a wood sword in one hand and my dick in the other, and nothing in Tunic was that reset-heavy yet.

That was about my experience in every overworld and dungeon section of Tunic. Each new area ramped up the difficulty hard, but after a few deaths I started to figure some stuff out, and eventually I’d open up a shortcut or reach a new checkpoint or find some new equipment. It was good. I liked it.

But then I met a boss I couldn’t beat. The thing had more health by far than any other monster in the game up to that point. It attacked so fast and so frequently that just finding a moment in the fight to safely position myself to use one of my limited healing potions was a real challenge. After about an hour of dying and resetting I had not got the boss down below 60% health once.

The feedback I chose to take was, okay, I shouldn’t kill this guy right now. There are other areas I can go and explore, and I’ll come back much later when I’m stronger. I pushed through a few more areas of the game and unlocked some new powers, and eventually ran into another boss I threw myself at for an hour without getting below 60% health.

The difference was, now, there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Tunic follows the traditional Zelda formula pretty closely: you need the red, blue, and green macguffins to open the thing and get to the second half of the game. Well, I’d been through the red, blue, and green levels. I managed to kill the blue boss — the toughest challenge I’d overcome in the game by far — but the red and green bosses were so far beyond me that I couldn’t see a path to victory except to just be really, really good at not only dodging attacks but also dodging into advantageous positioning.

Which I can’t do. Because it’s Dark Souls.

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Big Sword Guy – A Deep Dive

I’m going to describe this boss fight in some detail, but I’m going to try and keep my descriptions abstract, in case you haven’t played Tunic yet and are sensitive to spoilers. That said, after uninstalling the game in disgust I really wish I had spoiled myself more on the game’s content, at least enough to know to avoid buying it. So maybe you’re in the same position and this description will be helpful.

Big Sword Guy has four distinct sword attacks (plus a few other non-sword attacks) that all need to be dodged in different ways.

Attack #1 is an instant turn-around slash which hits in a narrow arc behind him. He won’t do it unless you’re standing there, so you can avoid this attack just by staying in front of him. I learned this pretty early in my attempts.

Attack #2 is a dashing forward lunge. You can block this with your shield, but the hit is so powerful that the recoil from absorbing it leaves you unable to do much in the way of counterattack; if you block it, you give up your opportunity to hit the boss. Dodging backwards or forwards means eating the lunge, so that leaves dodging to the side. In fact, I found dodging to actually be worse than just side-stepping. If you dodge, you’re too far away now to counter, but if you just step to the side and let the lunge go by you, the boss is now locked into a recovery animation right inside your effective range. (Just don’t step back TOO far or you’ll circle around to his back, and then see Attack #1, above.)

Attack #3 is a huge forward arc, then a huge follow-up arc in the opposite direction. There’s nothing Tunic can do to interrupt a boss’s attack pattern once it starts, so you can only sneak in a hit here if you have some way to deal with both slashes. The easiest way is to just not be standing there; dodge or run backwards and the arcs will just miss you. Blocking them chews up all your stamina, which is fine if you have as many upgrades as I had, but I suspect most players won’t. (To me, it really felt like the first attack was supposed to eat up your whole bar and make you vulnerable to the follow-up. But I had been everywhere and explored absolutely everything, and had found enough stamina upgrades to survive both hits.) The issue here is, if you’re in a position that the attack misses you (or if you have enough stamina to just block) you don’t have any breathing room to comfortably counterattack. The solution I came up with was to dodge twice; roll back from the first arc, then roll forward through the follow-up. Time it right, and you’ll i-frame your way through the hit and end up right in the boss’s face, good enough for three hits, if you’re quick.

Attack #4 is a jumping downstrike. The strike itself can hit you but doesn’t actually try to track your position, so you can avoid it just by being far away. However, the strike also sends a shockwave across the ground you must dodge roll through. Tunic can’t jump and her shield is useless in this situation. If you’re anticipating the jump and know about where the boss will land, you can stay about mid-screen from him and time your roll to go over the shockwave just as it leaves his sword, placing yourself perfectly for three hits.

In isolation, I could comfortably perform all of these feats of execution. What I mean is, if the boss only had his turn-around slash, plus one of these other attacks, plus his other bits and bobbins, I would have found the fight extremely hard but also very doable. I would had an excellent moment of achievement.

But my reaction time is 450ms, so that’s not the experience I had.

The boss’s wind-up for his arc vs. his lunge vs. his jump all look different. Different enough that you can tell what’s coming pretty consistently. But I’m Shitty McSlowbrain over here, so I could either identify his attacks or select the appropriate dodge, but never both. If I watched his sword and correctly identified the lunge, it was too late to side-step because the lunge had already hit me. And if I kept all the different inputs in my thumbs to focus instead on picking the correct one for this moment, I would have no idea which one to pick.

I had to guess.

Guessing right meant I could do a combo’s worth of damage, and if I guessed right ten or twelve times in a row and also upended my inventory of bombs and magic spells into the obss, I could have maybe won, and progressed in the game.

I wanted to describe this boss in detail to prove that I really did make every effort possible. Intellectually, I understand what the boss does and how he moves and how the game expects me to move in response. I’m past the knowledge checkpoint phase of learning the fight, and just repeatedly failing on the execution.

Well, the boss never got any easier, and neither did the other boss I was stuck on (who I could also describe in this much detail). And the game couldn’t continue until both were dead. I won’t swear I had literally found every secret and pickup in the world, but I had been pretty exhaustive in my explorations. And besides, I was failing out before the halfway mark on the boss’s health bar; another heart container or point of damage wasn’t going to be what got me up and over the hump.

Steam reports I have about 25 hours played of Tunic, and I didn’t get appreciably stuck in any other part of the game outside of these boss fights. That means, horrifyingly, I spent something like a combined eight bleeding hours just trying one boss, then the other, trying to “guess better” and win, and never getting better than halfway.

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But Brick! Tunic Has Difficulty Settings!

Tunic isn’t Dark Souls. Someone on the dev team realized that designing a game to purposely exclude some segment of the playerbase who might otherwise love it is, well, not a bad busines strategy, since From Software always makes a billion dollars with each of its games, but is at least a little bit mean. So they put in a “No Fail” option.

No Fail Mode is just an invincibility toggle. Turn it on and the game doesn’t actually get any easier or more approachabale, you just can’t be damaged now by any enemy attack. This might have been the only solution available of the Tunic developers; I have no idea what their situation was. But it’s a pretty terrible solution for someone like me, who is really only here to engage with the gameplay.

Admittedly, I’m not a big story guy in video games at the best of times. I enjoy a good story, but it’s exceptionally rare that I will play a video game to completion just for story alone. Especially not now, in the age of YouTube and Twitch.tv. I wanted to like Tunic on the strength of its exploration and its combat, that is, the things I really like about traditional Legend of Zelda games. And for the record, I think that outside of the few boss fights that bottlenecked me, the game mostly delivers on that promise. I found it to be difficult, but also challenging, and often rewarding.

But it will never feel challenging or rewarding to defeat a boss because you put in a Game Genie code. Big Sword Guy had all the same undodgeable attacks, and he hit me 400 times, and I only won because I was allowed to be invincible and he wasn’t.

I’m frequently told that Dark Souls-style games are about crafting a very particular type of experience. If that’s true, and if Tunic is following in that mold, then it has failed miserably. Nobody who plays Tunic on No Fail Mode is going to have a great experience with overcoming a really tough challenge that they worked really hard at. They’re going to have to give up instead, and then either leave the game unfinished, or turn on No Fail to complete it, which is what I did. Both of those experiences suck.

The proper thing to do here — and this is what every non-Dark Souls-inspired action/adventure game does — is to have several difficulty options, each of which makes slight alterations to gameplay. That way Toughguy McDarksouls can play on Super Hard and get the grueling split-second boss fights he craves, enabling his monkey brain to release 3700 Endorphin Points. Meanwhile, me and the other Shitty McSlowbrains of the world can play on Normal, and fight a version of the boss who is a little weaker or slower or less aggressive, enabling our monkey brains to release 3700 Endorphin Points. Most modern games even go a step further and have something like Story Mode difficulty, which I have never selected and cannot speak to, but I imagine it allows some players to get whatever level of interactive stimulation they crave, also to the tune of 3700 Endorphin Points.

Well, the Tunic folks either didn’t think of this or didn’t care to try, and so it’s Super Hard or Literally Invulnerable, with nothing in between. It’s better than absolutely nothing, which is always From Software’s choice, but only marginally.

And before I leave this thought, no, Tunic‘s story is not worth playing on No Fail just to see it. The world is cute and the lore has some neat aspects, but it doesn’t break any new ground or advance the art form in any direction. It’s a perfectly cromulent backdrop to a game you’re already playing and enjoying, not something that’s worth experiencing in and of itself.

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Yeah But There’s a–

I know about the Hourglass. I found it. I used it extensively in every boss fight I got stuck on. It didn’t help, and even if it did, it would still be a lousy solution.

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The Exploration and Puzzles, Though!

I’m as good at exploration and puzzle games as the Dark Souls fanboys are at dodge rolling. Boss fights they find too easy fail to stimulate them, and I know a few such fans who have noticed a real sense of Difficulty Creep over the years as developers chase ever more extreme levels of harder, faster, tougher, meaner.

I’m like that with puzzle games, I guess. But the playing field isn’t the same. I solved Myst in 1994 and, 400 years later, Obduction wasn’t that much harder. Similarly, when Breath of the Wild just regurgitated a bunch of Ocarina of Time puzzle concepts back at me, I batted them down without breaking my stride. Games with intellectual or observational challenges just aren’t getting harder as time goes on.

(And honestly, I don’t even know what that would look like.)

It’s an inexact comparison too, because if you defeat a tough boss, you might enjoy fighting that same boss again later, just for the fun of it. The execution alone is a good exercise to revisit, even after you know all the attacks and are well-practiced and well-equipped enough to dodge and counter them all. There’s a reason I keep playing old Mega Man games, forever.

But puzzles aren’t like that. Once you solve a great puzzle, you know how to solve it, and even if you forget the specifics of the solution, most of the fun is in discovering the method, which hangs around forever. Actually inputting the solution to Myst‘s fireplace puzzle, or carefully lining up arrow shots in the proper order in Zelda, isn’t as exciting as a Mega Man boss rush you’ve played before, and never can be.

So what’s Tunic like in this regard?

Well, for a while, you’re going to be discovering a lot of secret passages. The world is interconnected in a lot of convenient ways which, on replays I will never experience, probably lead to lots of interesting sequence breaking opportunities. But I’ve played a lot of games where pushing against walls yields results, so as soon as I realized this was what Tunic was doing, I started finding a boatload of hidden stuff in every area. Once or twice I found a backroute into (or out of) an area and ended up circling back from the other side to make sure I “did it properly,” since this was my first playthrough.

It’s a cool way to design a world and it does set Tunic apart, but if this is what people are talking about when they say Tunic is a fun exploration game, I’m not impressed. The actual discovery of all these passages and secret or hidden spaces was fun while I was discovering them but they never helped me beat the boss I was stuck on, and the prospect of forcing myself though the boss over the course of 100 retries to earn the chance to discover more passages and hidden spaces didn’t excite me.

There are actual puzzles in the game, too. I don’t mean “hit the red switch with the fire rod”, either; I mean real old-school pen-and-paper type puzzles. You eventually figure out how to spot these in the game world and what to do to solve them, and then there’s a big Final Boss meta-puzzle where you put it all together and get the only solution that works.

I never got stuck on any of these, and I’m not aware of any remaining clues in the game world that I haven’t correctly interpreted. Even the big bad meta-puzzle, what I’m sure some players will either champion as the game’s crowning moment or decry as unsolvable bullshit, didn’t slow me down. I found a clue that I immediately interpreted correctly, then I spent about twenty minutes correlating my paper notes into an organized solution that made sense. (And it’s self-checking, too. Puzzle books have to be, of course.) It was an enjoyable exercise but it won’t be one of my highlight video gaming experiences this year.

In very broad terms, all the puzzling in the game culminates to a very, very easy version of the Sun’s Map puzzle from The Fool’s Errand. If you don’t know what that means, you might get really stuck on it for a long time and then feel incredible when you finally solve it. If you do know what it means, don’t worry, I haven’t given you any more information towards formulating a solution than the game itself does, and you’re now left feeling either nostalgic or disappointed, depending on how the prospect of babby’s first sun’s map strikes you.

Tunic’s exploration is engaging, but nothing original. And its puzzles are pleasant, but pedestrian. It’s really the combat challenges that carry the experience, and they proved impossible. All told, I spent about 12 hours exploring and solving the game, plus another 12 slamming my head against boss fights. Three of these, I was never, ever going to win fairly. (That is, the two I mentioned, plus the final boss, who was appreciably harder than both and had multiple phases.)

I left Tunic feeling incredibly bitter. I want my $30 back.

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A Thought Experiment

The hardest pure puzzle series I know is RHEM. These are point-and-click adventure puzzle games where you will live and die on the accuracy and meticulousness of your notes, plus hours and hours of grueling investigation as you search every square inch of every screen for miserly scraps of clues you may have missed. I love them dearly.

Here’s what I’d like to see.

Let’s have someone make a game with decent, but average, video game combat at about the baseline difficulty for, say, a Tomb Raider or Horizon game. Challenging, but not at the extreme edge of the medium. Or maybe a Mario or Zelda game, where the boss fights are big spectacles that rely on pattern recognition or tool use rather than reflexes. You know, enjoyable enough, but nothing a Dark Souls fanboy would write home about.

Then, right at the 50% mark of story completion, let’s drop a hardcore do-or-die RHEM puzzle right in the way of progression. I mean a real banger too, I’m talking rock spires or puzzle apartments, like, have fun being stuck for five hours, forehead. Oh, and let’s randomize the clues in-game and make the solution a little different for each player. Same puzzle, but the implementation space is too large to just pass on the solution; at best, the walkthrough sites can describe how to solve it but the player will still have to go in and do all the work.

I think we’d see fireworks. I think we’d see a lot of folks suddenly crying bullshit. I think the accumulation of all their exasperation and confusion will foam up about their waists and all the toxic soulsboys will look up and shout, “WTF ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO!?”

…and I’ll look down and whisper, “GIT GUD.”