Quote Originally Posted by Mystic Muse View Post
I struggled with medium difficulty, so yes.
The Guitar Hero learning curve from Medium to Hard absolutely kicked my ass. I could breeze through almost every song on Medium with a near-perfect, and then I fell all to pieces the instant I got to Hard difficulty. That jump to the 5th button and having to shift back and forth was such a mind-breaking hurdle that I never got past it. This is subjective and plenty of people didn't struggle the way I did, but I maintain that they should've done more to ease that transition. I hate a nearly-vertical learning curve.

That's also what kept Tunic from being a 10/10 videogame for me: despite gorgeous visuals and innovative game design and excellent puzzles and a truly, astonishingly beautiful central premise, they did a terrible job of ramping up difficulty between boss fights. Everyone I know who has played the game has had their flow completely wrecked by the "final" boss fight, which suddenly throws in 5 new mechanics that you've never had to learn and sends you scrambling to an online walkthrough in the worst possible game to be reading an online walkthrough.

The entire point of Tunic is "figure it out on your own:" discovering something on your own in Tunic is so rewarding in a way I've never seen in another game. Letting the player muddle their way to the final boss fight without requiring them to learn all the necessary skills along the way was a fundamental betrayal of that game design and as a result the game kinda trips over the finish line.

Yes, I know the "golden" ending avoids this, and is in fact a much better distillation of the game's themes and mechanics. If you just skip the "final boss fight" entirely you will have a much more fluid and rewarding game experience. But nobody I know is willing to skip a final boss fight in a game; even if they know it's the "imperfect" ending, they still want to accomplish that challenge before going back to finish the game "properly."