Tunic has inspired in me a wonder for video games again.
Tunic is an adventure game. Tunic is a dungeon crawler. Tunic is a getting your teeth kicked in simulator. Tunic is a brilliant homage not to what The Legend of Zelda is or ever was, but much more importantly to what it felt like to play as a nine-year-old trying to find your way through such a big world without any guidance. Tunic is mysterious, Tunic is uncompromising, and Tunic will forever hold secrets that I will never find and never fully understand.
I think I’m in love. I have a new indie sweetheart, which has come and gone too fast and left me craving more. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like a game has been so impactful for me. I think I’m a changed person now? Something unforgettable has been served to me on a silver platter, completely to my surprise—Tunic has been such a different experience than I anticipated.
The world of Tunic is constructed masterfully, and it is that world that powers players to engage with deeper puzzle-solving and exploration. There’s an aura of mystery surrounding each area you explore and the general plot/lore, with enough breadcrumbs dropped throughout for you to piece together your own working version of events without much being directly told to you—as the lead developer has put it, “It is a story that is not an act of consumption, so much as an act of creation.” It’s because I was so deeply curious about the world I was moving through, and because I had my breath taken away with increasing frequency by what I experienced as my journey progressed, that I felt motivated to push onwards. There are certain watershed moments that crop up periodically that completely shift your understanding of the game world, and they dropped my jaw nearly every time.
Tunic’s main gameplay flow is heavily combat-oriented—rather than balancing smatterings of enemies with item-based puzzle-solving as in Zelda, Tunic’s dungeons are more akin to a series of enemy encounters the player must determine how best to approach (and which will likely take a few attempts to get through). In fact, there’s not many dungeon items to be found at all. Enemies will chase you relentlessly, and resting at a checkpoint will respawn them all. At first, I found this frustrating, as there was no way for me to chip away at combat challenges while I learned the basics of how to fight—I had to complete them all in one go. Yes, whatever, I found combat frustrating early on because I was bad at it. But in another sense, it continued to frustrate even as my skills improved when it came to overworld exploration, as I found myself fighting the same group of enemies over and over again. I respect the respawn system as a way to force the player to actually solve each combat scenario instead of just brute forcing their way through—it works well in dungeons given that they’re meant to be gauntlets that you only really venture through once, but can be a little more annoying with the overworld, since you’ll be zigzagging across it constantly.
Boss fights really highlight the simple but effective nature of the combat—though your combat capabilities remain relatively stagnant throughout the game (you’ll get a new item here or there, but the basic formula never changes: dodge, block, swing your sword), combat is kept engaging by the varying tactics of your foes. Boss fights are all about learning to recognize the big bad’s attacks and respond with lightning speed. They’re tough, but nothing’s more satisfying than finally overcoming a boss that at first encounter seemed impossible.
Exploration and combat combine for a perfectly satisfactory experience. It’s in Tunic’s endgame, however, that an entirely different game is revealed through a plethora of puzzles unlike anything I’ve played before, all entirely optional. If the puzzle-solving isn’t your speed, you can simply go fight the final boss and be done with the game. Likewise, if the combat’s a bit much for you, you can tone down how much it asks of you in the settings. But I believe each to be an integral part of Tunic. While the majority of the puzzle-solving is easily seen as detached content floating outside and coming after the “main campaign”, it is (most likely) introduced to the player before they finish said campaign, and is another example of a watershed moment where the player’s perception of the world shifts. The puzzles were there the entire time, but you simply didn’t notice them, didn’t know how to interact with them.
That’s right, it’s time to talk about the manual.
More than new abilities or items, Tunic’s progression is dictated uniquely by knowledge above all else. Perhaps your most helpful collectible is pages from the game’s supposed instruction manual—beyond being an incredibly charming homage to a bygone era of gaming, it serves as your number one source of information on gameplay mechanics, the narrative, and simply what to do. It will subtly guide you in the right direction so that you never feel lost yet never feel like your hand has been held, and upon acquiring certain pages, new paths or objectives will be opened up to you not because you couldn’t go somewhere or do something before, but because you simply didn’t know how. In theory, it sounds like it could be a recipe for frustration, but because game progression is built around the assumption that the player won’t know about certain mechanics until they get certain pages, it instead inspires a sort of “ohhhhhhh” feeling. It always feels clever, and furthermore creates a situation where no repeat playthrough will ever be the same as your first—once you know these things, you don’t forget them. Revelations in how you can interact with the world are a core part of the experience.
As for the puzzles, the solutions can all be found inside the manual if one simply looks hard enough—the logic builds upon itself in a brilliant progression so that inconspicuous details slowly start to gain meaning. The moments when a solution finally clicks are so satisfying. Some of the puzzles are particularly esoteric, but again, there’s a logic to it all, and experimentation, curiosity, and outside-the-box thinking are all rewarded. Besides... in a sense, I don’t think you’re meant to be able to blast through all these puzzles anyway. You’re meant to sit with them for a long time, maybe not even know they exist until you play the game again years later and notice something you didn’t before... Tunic is the sort of game to strive to truly have secrets lying in wait forever, secrets that you never figure out and that you never necessarily need to figure out. Sure, you can look up all you want online for immediate answers and a wide breadth of information, but maybe something is lost when you try to squeeze everything you can out of a game—there’s magic in that space, that unknown. This is exactly what made the games you played as a child feel so full of wonder.
After so much time gushing, I’d be remiss not to note a few nitpicks I had with the game. Playing on the Switch, I noticed instances of poor performance throughout—nothing that really strongly impacts the experience, but load times could get a bit long (especially booting the game up), and the would-be-cool lighting effect upon returning from any checkpoint stuttered every time. Small moments of slowdown were noticeable but not majorly disruptive. It’s an aesthetically pleasing game, though you’d think that the lower-poly nature of it would make processing everything pretty easy. Guess I was mistaken. My final note for Switch players was that I’m sure some level of puzzle-solving frustration was caused by the Switch Pro Controller D-Pad being a little eh.
As for actual design nitpicks rather than bashing the Switch’s specs, there were a handful of times I seemingly got stuck and had to quickly exit and re-enter the game to unlodge myself from between whatever piece of geometry and wall I’d squirmed my way into. I found it a little disorienting sometimes that the “no” option is always highlighted rather than “yes” for popup actions. As charming as the isometric perspective is, sometimes I wished I could wiggle the camera a little to better see myself behind a wall. And most interestingly, I think this is the first game where “I keep accidentally teleporting to the final boss” was a persistent issue. If you know, you know (surely other people had to have run into this too, right?).
Tunic has managed to provide me with an unforgettable experience. Difficult but fair, it is made satisfying because it respects the player’s abilities, both physical and mental, at every turn. The places you visit and experiences the journey has in store continuously surprised, and what is already a fun experience is turned on its head in the endgame to provide some of the craziest puzzle-solving I’ve ever tackled. It’s this puzzle-solving that is, in my opinion, the true gift Tunic gives—Tunic is one of those magical experiences that has redefined for me what games can (and should!) be, and I’ll always treasure that.