Some Preamble

The observant will notice that it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve written one of these. There are plenty of reasons for this, not least of which that I was in kind of a slump and didn’t really get excited by games for most of that time.

I think the closest I had was an experience with Breath of the Wild, where Alex and I unexpectedly encountered Farosh emerging from a spring. We hadn’t ever seen a dragon in the game yet, and one of them being 5 feet from my virtual face was, in a literal sense, amazing. The music, the presence of danger, the general feeling of insignificance when faced with such a massive being; these were the first time I had felt awe in my real human life in quite a while. Obviously, that falls off a bit when you start farming dragons for their tasty scales, but it was still something I remember quite vividly.

I mention this to illustrate how much impact a game has had on me if I feel compelled to pick up my… keys? (Certainly not a pen!) Partially, I find myself with a lot more energy than I have for a while, but also I’ve rediscovered my love of games, and this was the first one to grab me so strongly in a while. To put it bluntly:

Tunic, for me, was an absolute masterpiece.

That’s a strong statement, and I want to spend a while talking about why that is. It’s not without its flaws, but it proved to be a device fine-tuned to destroy my ability to think about anything else for about a month.

Warning: light spoilers ahead.

The Beginning

Tunic begins twice for me.

Once is in the title screen: an understated affair, reminiscent of an old JRPG. A 3D render of a big, manatech-looking sword spins slowly to the left of the menu. The music evokes contemplation, and hints at the broader mysteries the game presents (and never really answers). It’s probably not as important as I’m making it out to be, but just sitting here for 5-10 seconds always puts me in a mood, and it’s one that this game excels at for me.

The second time the game begins happens only once (kinda, it’s complicated). You get a quick pan of some of the wild landscape you’re about to explore, and center on a cute be-tunicked fox apparently asleep on a beach. They wake up, and… there you go. That’s basically all the direction you’re going to get. (Again, kinda, it’s still complicated).

Once again, the music kicks in and does some heavy lifting. It’s light and airy, but not energetic; it’s inviting you on a meander. And meander you shall! You start with literally nothing, and are funneled briefly in one direction. Then there’s an old cave with a treasure chest, and it’s hauntingly familiar.

I could ramble for quite a while about how much inspiration this game took from the first three Zelda games. In fact, in another version of this essay, I did, but I feel like that sidetracks us from the point. Suffice to say, the world feels so much like the original, until, suddenly, it doesn’t. And the swordplay feels way more like the second than anything else; of course, there’s also a parry now, because Dark Souls exists.

Now You See It…

You spend quite a while wandering this wild landscape. This game may not look like much, but it also looks gorgeous? I’m not sure if that makes any sense… The art style is fairly minimalistic, but it has a certain… depth? a richness? that makes it compelling to look at. It’s hard not to wonder about all the strange artifacts in the periphery. But, mostly, you’re lost.

Eventually you find pieces of the instruction booklet, which helps guide you toward understanding the game, first on a literal level, then on a meta level, and then on a meta-meta level. Yes, the instruction booklet is just scattered around. It’s just a battered old NES-style collection of pages, but every time you pick one up, you unlock a wealth of precious knowledge. Sometimes it’s as simple as “did you know you can do a dodge-roll attack?”. (Because, again, Dark Souls). Sometimes it’s a map, with your little fox painted onto the page in the appropriate position. Sometimes it’s… confusing?

The beauty of how this game dispenses knowledge is, I think, twofold. First, nearly all the text in the game is in a language you can’t read. (Technically, it’s a special phonetic alphabet for English, but that’s not very important). You’re left wondering what certain golden words mean, and rely on your instincts as a gamer to decipher the pictures and vague gesticulating the pages’ arrows are attempting. Even when you get new information, it’s not immediately clear what it means. I had several experiences of being excited to pick up a new page, only to find it offered nothing new. I was always proven wrong.

The second thing that makes the whole experience amazing is that the trickle of sweet knowledge juice is agonizingly slow. This doesn’t sound great, but I promise it is. You’re so driven to collect those pages in hopes that they illuminate something: the ruined statues, the goddess-apparent trapped in a ghost dimension, the hints at a ruined civilization. Then they don’t. But every single page leaves you with some answers, often to questions you didn’t know you had.

This slow pacing was what brought me back every time to this game, and what nearly drove me down an endless rabbit hole. Every single play session, I learned something new about how the game works that fundamentally reshaped my understanding of what it was about. This, for me, was the crux of what made this game so great. It constantly recontextualizes everything you know about the game, and, eventually, you’re evaluating every new symbol or object for hidden meaning.

And you’re rewarded for it.

Leaving the Nest

Tunic is not an easy game, but not for the reasons you might think. Sure, the combat is challenging, and the shield-bash-parry timing is a little tricky. The real reason it’s hard is because it gives you so little direction. I spent hours without a map, and only a vague understanding that it might be one of those types of games that wants you to think laterally about how to approach it.

So, for the first hour, maybe almost two, I wandered around without a sword. I found a stick early on, so I wasn’t defenseless against the increasingly difficult enemies. The problem came from the fact that there are little shrubs that you have to cut down with a sword to advance. Because I was still thinking it to be one of those games, I came up with a solution: lead enemies with swords into the bushes, and let them clear the path for me. I felt so. Damned. Clever. And I managed to get a fair amount of helpful loot in the form of firecrackers, which function like grenades in most games. I eventually used these to breeze past the game’s first boss (which, inevitably, became a regular enemy). It felt like a singular experience to me. It probably wasn’t, but I do think it speaks to the game’s depth that I could accidentally get so far off the intended path.

I did, eventually, need a sword. It turned out I had been missing a fairly obvious path blocked by cuttable-but-walkable grass for a long time. I eventually realized that statues of the goddess abounded, and that I could recover my health by resting there. And the enemies (because, again, Dark Souls).

I wended my way through the forest, a ruined beach, and some dungeons. I overcame satisfying trials. I slowly started to glean the Meaning of the Manual ™️. Eventually, I freed the goddess. Spoilers?

What is interesting about this game is not its narrative, but its meta-narrative. The instruction manual is part of the world, but… should it be? Eventually, you learn the secrets of The Holy Cross, or at least some imitations of it. Then, the frequency illusion kicks in, and you start seeing it everywhere. Or was it really an illusion? It was everywhere to begin with. I won’t elaborate on what The Holy Cross is here, because that verges into deeper spoilers, but it becomes arguably the biggest way to reevaluate the whole world you’ve yet encountered.

Near the same page that teaches you about that, you, much later, may find a page that hints at 20 Hidden Things. Once you find one, you start realizing the manual more or less tells you where you can find others. Then you’re hunting those down, because you weren’t satisfied with killing the goddess.

Yeah, you do that. You also come to terms with lost souls, die at least once, encounter a truly horrifying spirit-and-bone fox-puppet-merchant, punch a bird, and destroy the empty shells the goddess left behind. Several varieties, even! Gotta slay ‘em all.

And Then Peace

I can’t speak highly enough of how many layers this game has, and how expertly it reveals them. I didn’t even touch on the recently discovered second language of the game that’s hidden in its various sounds, musical and otherwise; that’s where I tapped out, still curious, but unwilling to defeat that particular colossus. The gameplay oscillates between zealous exploration, tempered by fear of ambush, followed by frenetic combat - due to that ambush! It gets easier over time, but the challenge of the game, as mentioned, is figuring out how to use the information you’ve been given, more than it is about the actual mechanics of gameplay. The music constantly sets pitch-perfect tones, the environment is vast and inscrutable, and your head will spin with nigh-eldritch revelations.

If I have to pick some nits off of this gem, they would mostly revolve around the somewhat lackluster combat. You do gather some more options to make it more interesting, but there are a number of enemies you can’t parry, and, like many games where exploration is the real point, backtracking through crowds of baddies gets a bit tedious.

However, if puzzling over cryptic info and feeling like an absolute badass when you put it together sounds like a fun time to you, then this is my appeal, maybe even my plea: go play Tunic. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it was definitely for me, and maybe it will be for you.

If you’ve been listening to the audio version of this, the soundtracks are by:

Lifeformed (of the official Tunic soundtrack)

Lesfm (an excellent site for royalty-free music)

Julius H. (creator of lots of fun synth, and some instrumental covers)

AmarantaMusic (makes some reasonably epic-sounding ambient tracks)

Manaka Kataoka (for the clip of the Breath of the Wild dragon theme)