{"id":59331,"date":"2023-07-03T12:50:28","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T16:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=59331"},"modified":"2023-07-06T18:23:22","modified_gmt":"2023-07-06T22:23:22","slug":"tunic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=59331","title":{"rendered":"Tunic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been playing some Tunic<\/a> the last few days, because the Steam Summer Sale managed to poke me at just the right moment to get an impulse buy. I was interested enough that I paid $20 for a game that came out like a year ago instead of my usual “Wait until I can pick it up for a few dollars and run it on a contemporary potato” gaming strategy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s very<\/em> to my taste, and I’m enjoying it, but it is, in classic self-indulgent indie game fashion, “Video game tropes: the game.” Not that there’s anything wrong with making things for your own in-group, but it winks so hard you start to wonder about a palsy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The visual style and gameplay nod to everything. Fez. The whole Zelda franchise. Soulsbornes. Some Monument Valley style geometry illusion\/architectural environmental storytelling. Bunches of stereotypical Supergiant details. It’s never met a game trope it didn’t like. They executed and integrated pretty well though, and I am in the market segment that connects to the references. [Ed: Oh look. Some Half Life 2 Citadel and more explicit Chrono Trigger refs late(?) game!]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not …quite… as self-indulgent as Lenna’s Inception (same kind of 2D Zeldalike vein, did it a few summers ago, had slightly more fun than irritation about how hard it was sniffing its own farts), and it’s far more modern and sophisticated than the various Solarus<\/a> engine games. The visual style is both cuter and more spectacular than either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also has the classic indie game feature of being relatively graphically simple, built on a major engine, and still being kind of a resource hog … though I’m playing on Linux via Proton\/DXVK, on a workstation-model Polaris12 GPU, so some of the “Barely holding 24fps at 720p on a system that can do way more visually impressive games” is probably my fault [Ed: performance issue suddenly fixed after update and reboot, must have been a driver\/system state thing]. I will say, having not played many commercial game for the last few years, the progress with transparent, performant functionality out of the Proton ecosystem is really impressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been playing some Tunic the last few days, because the Steam Summer Sale managed to poke me at just the right moment to get an impulse buy. I was interested enough that I paid $20 for a game that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-entertainment","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}