What is Tunic?
Tunic is an indie action adventure game in the style of 2D Legend of Zelda games. The game is played from an angled, top-down isometric camera. Tunic is a game heavily focused on puzzles and having the player put together important pieces of knowledge of the world. Tunic released on March 16, 2022 and is available on these platforms: Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 & 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S&X, Xbox Cloud, Microsoft Windows, and Mac. Tunic takes around 12 hours to finish the main quest.
Game Review:
Tunic is an incredibly charming game. Its art direction and visual style had me intrigued from the beginning and reminded me of older top-down Zelda games. The main character, a fox, is even dressed in a green tunic like Link. But Tunic also adds some depth to its visual inspiration by having a 3D world with nooks and crannies to look in and explore littered throughout its world. It also shakes things up by having a 45 degree isometric camera that can shift rather than a purely top down camera. This game takes inspiration from older titles but carves out its own visual style that is super endearing.
An awesome feature in the game is that Tunic has a discoverable instruction manual for the player to use, reminiscent of old NES and SNES games where the manual would guide the player to what they needed to do. The player discovers pages to this instruction manual as they play the game, collecting random pages that combine to make the book. But you get them in mixed up order, meaning you get some pages that are at the end of the manual before you get pages before, leaving you with little context for what those pages mean. But with those later pages you get hints about end goals and objectives that can be really helpful and motivating to keep exploring.
The big twist and shakeup is that most text and language in the game is not the player's spoken language. The developers created a text made of different characters that most information is written in, including the instruction manual. This leaves the player with a lot of mystery and necessitates some interpretation. Don’t worry, though, the developers do a great job at using illustrations and enough real language to make it understandable. They also do a great job at scripting what pages you get in certain areas that it lines up with what information you would need in that situation.
The fact that most text is in a different language and you only get some instruction manual pages means that throughout most of the game, you don’t really know what’s going on or why you need to do what you’re doing. It teases you with possible scenarios and then often flips your expectations on their head. I won’t go much into the story because that’s a major component of the game but the story shifts its tone as you go deeper and discover more about what’s actually happening in this world. While I didn’t personally take away any message in particular I was intrigued by the ambiguous storytelling used throughout the game and think the story only adds to the experience.
Gameplay in Tunic feels like a combination of a 2D Zelda game and a game from the Dark Souls franchise. You have 3 slots where you can equip items that you can use like in a Zelda game but functionally it plays more like Dark Souls. You also have a health bar, stamina bar, and magic bar. The stamina bar is borrowed from Dark Souls as certain actions decrease stamina like your dodge roll and blocking with a shield. This stamina bar recharges when not being used but it means you have to be strategic with your actions and not just spam certain abilities. It also utilizes save points in the forms of shrines similar to a bonfire in the Souls franchise.
Tunic also takes inspiration in its difficulty from the Dark Souls franchise. There are some enemies and bosses that kicked my butt, taking many tries before I eventually succeeded. Bosses are made to be brutally hard and require very patient and strategic play to conquer. Tunic also borrows the idea from Dark Souls that when you die you leave a spirit where you died, and if you make it back to that point you can recover the coins you lost when you died. This creates incentive to make it back to where you died and try again. Fortunately, (unlike Souls games) its shrine checkpoint system is pretty forgiving and the shrines are intentionally placed in helpful areas.
Where Tunic really shines is its puzzles. The whole world is designed in a puzzle with hidden passages, items, and teleporters spread all over the map and in places you wouldn’t even necessarily think to look. Many times I accidentally went down a path I couldn’t see which led me to getting to a hidden chest or other item. There are also plenty of blocked off areas or things that are clearly interactive, but aren’t accessible until later in the game, when you have the necessary tools or knowledge.
The main objectives in Tunic are baked into the puzzles while also being elaborate puzzles within themselves. And if you are a puzzle master, the end game of Tunic has one of the most elaborate and intense puzzles I have ever seen in a video game. It is unnecessary to beat the game but it is there for those who are seeking 100% completion, and boy is it a doozy. You literally have to either take screenshots or take notes on pen and paper if you even want to have a chance at solving the final puzzles. I personally didn’t do it after I read about how intense the puzzles are, but I think it was a great game design choice by the developers to have these super intense puzzles available but not required. In my opinion it shows that the developers really thought hard and intentionally about what they were doing.
Family Friendliness:
Tunic is family friendly in that the art style is very cute and inviting. There’s no graphic violence or anything like that, it’s very similar to a 2D Zelda in terms of combat violence so I would say it’s appropriate for kids. There are a few sections where themes get a little more intense if you extrapolate but I personally think a lot of the stuff might go over a kid's head. As an adult those instances cause me more to ask questions than anything really. This is a single player game but I think it could be really fun if you have family or friends who love puzzles to help you try and solve puzzles in this game.
Features for Parents:
Tunic is very parent friendly in my opinion. It has very generous checkpointing systems and the ability to pause whenever you need. While the game is very difficult, the developers provide some incredible accessibility features such as: reduced combat difficulty, audio puzzle hints, and a no-fail mode. The no-fail mode is a feature where you won’t take any damage which at first sounds like it removes any sense of difficulty whatsoever which isn’t really true. Your character still staggers from every hit so it may be difficult to actually defeat the enemies presented to you while this feature is enabled.
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Final Verdict:
Tunic is a game that would have been in my top 5 games of 2022 if I had played it before I released that list. It is a great blend of 2D Zelda games and the systems present in Souls games. It provides a challenge while providing helpful accessibility options for those who are less combat inclined. And the game really shines in its puzzle design, both in the world and through the instruction manual. Tunic provides fun engaging puzzles for everyone while having the depth to challenge true puzzle masters also available. Tunic is a game I can’t recommend more.