So I've been playing Tunic of around 4 hours or so and I absolutely love it. There are so many unique things about this game that make it so much fun. The exploration is fun and the fact that enemies only respawn once you save the game and replenish your health and items makes it so much easier or at least more exciting to explore the area and find all the secrets and chests. I have been resisting looking online for answer and instead just go very thoroughly through areas and kill everything in it so I can reap the rewards of gold. There isn't any XP in this game so it isn't really all that critical to grind for that sort of thing but grinding for gold can be important.
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There will be spoilers in this so if you want to play this game don't read ahead. This game is so much better if you don't know all about it before starting
One good thing about totally killing everything in an area is that this enables you to search out all the cleverly hidden areas. Sometimes when you stumble upon these areas it will reveal a shortcut that is absolutely huge and bypasses a ton of various gates. It's always kind of funny when you discover them because the area that it pops you out at later on is likely directly next to something that you spent a great deal of time simply walking past it over and over again.
That is one of the really neat things about this game: It isn't at all linear. While the pages of the guidebook that you find along the way kind of give you a guideline about what you CAN do next, you are not at all required to do it that way.
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The "dungeons" in particular, are extremely well-made and a ton of fun. I am currently about to complete the Forest Fortress and saved the game right before going into face what I am sure will be the final boss of that area. In this dungeon, I found a scrap of the guidebook that let me know about something I can do to activate these towers and I can't say for sure, but I think that I had the power to do this all along, even before they told me about it. I could be wrong about this but about an hour before learning about this power, I had been standing next to similar towers in other parts of the map smacking it with my sword and other items trying to figure out what the hell they are there for.
This is another thing that this game does remarkably well. On your travels you will notice certain things that obviously have some sort of important meaning as far as the game is concerned but you either do not yet know the control to activate it, or you don't have the item to utilize it properly. This encourages a lot of backtracking and re-exploring previously visited areas. The fact that you are far more powerful when you return just makes it all the more exciting because enemies that used to be terrifying and would encourage you to run away, are now enemies that you can easily take on many of at the same time.
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I use the spiders as a specific example of this for me because when I first encountered them I think I was in that area too early and they kicked the crap out of me and almost immediately killed me. Now when I get to them it is a simple matter of lock on, dodge, strike, dead. To be fair the first time I found them I didn't even have a sword yet and was whacking them with a stick. I also had minimum defense and HP so they made quick work of me. These days even if there are 6 of them I dispatch them without issue.
UPCOMING SPOILER
One thing that you should be doing if you are not is to use the items that you find such as bombs and firecrackers.. Use them indiscriminately. I am one of the kind of people that hang onto these items hoping to stockpile them for later big battles but that is not what you should be doing here. I found out that if you use 10 of any consumable item, you get one permanently added to your inventory that will automatically replenish every time you save.
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If you use all of your bombs you can go to the windmill store and buy more of them for something like 100 gold. You can get your gold back very quickly by just killing stuff so if you really want to power up your fox toon, just go around and get gold and keep using bombs. If you use a bomb on a difficult foe such as those knight type things with shields that are really tough to kill, you end up getting 20 gold when they die so you are 1/5 of the way to buying more bombs just by doing that.
Another thing to really look at is to remember to power up your stats. The game doesn't do a good job of explaining how this is possible and that is one of the mystiques of the overall game. You have to access your inventory while standing in front of a save statue and then pay gold as well as offer an item to up your stats.
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Until you power up these things the first time, you don't actually know what it is that it is going to power up, but they are all important aspects of your overall power. The difference between a level 0 attack and a level 3 attack, is immense. I will admit that I only found out how to do this when I YouTubed an answer to something. Otherwise, I don't believe the game ever tells you how you are actually supposed to do this. I think the opportunity for me to have accidentally stumbles upon this is pretty slim, so if I spoiled that part of the game for you, I may have actually prevented you from abandoning this game because without the powerups, I too believe this game it too difficult.
Make no mistake, this game is kind of tough but it isn't Dark Souls tough or anything and casual gamers like myself can get into this game very easily. This is the most fun I have had with a game in a while and again, if you ever appreciated the top-down adventure games similar to older Zelda games, you are really going to enjoy Tunic.