Tunic

Don’t let the charming, cute look of Tunic fool you: this game is more akin to Dark Souls than to the remake of Link’s Awakening. Its welcoming aesthetic is a ruse, locking you into a harsh and cryptic world, where enemies are merciless and the way forward is often concealed. It’s a game about secrets hidden in plain sight, about discovering things that were always there in front of you all along – you just didn’t know how to spot them.

In Tunic you play as a nameless fox, who wears a green tunic and brandishes a sword and shield. The game wears its inspirations on its sleeve: its aesthetic and top-down perspective harkens back to Zelda while the way you save, heal and, most importantly, progress through the world all come from the Souls games: you have bonfires in the form of Fox Shrines, which save your game and respawn enemies, flasks that recover a bit of health, but must be used carefully, as their animation leaves you in a vulnerable position, and when you explore an area you eventually come across ladders and hidden corridors that serve as shortcuts should you perish in battle and return to a shrine. Even the overall objectives honor Tunic’s two main influences: first, you must ring two bells, and then acquire three colorful medallions.

Tunic, however, uses these recurring tropes to its advantage, making them the only familiar element in an alien world. This is a game that goes out of its way to be inscrutable. When you acquire an item, its name and description are written in a language you can’t understand: you are supposed to discover what each of them do by using them – although you may be afraid of wasting the rarest ones in the process. Sometimes, you acquire cards you can equip, but you must deduce what their effect is by the vague drawing on them, as they have no description.

Even though the overworld is structured in a way that guides you to the right locations first, making other paths harder and trickier to reach, the way forward is also never spelled out to you. There’s a small moment late in the game that defines the experience of playing Tunic: when you eventually acquire the three medallions, the achievement that pops up is titled, “What now?” This is a game where you must discover everything by yourself, experiment and explore, test things and analyze your surroundings very carefully for clues.

This means that when you see the Fox Shrine for the first time, even though the game never tells you that it saves the game and respawn enemies, anyone familiar with Dark Souls will immediately identify its purpose. By the same token, Zelda players will instantly recognize spots on the map that indicate that the protagonist will eventually acquire a grappling hook. In other words, in this strange, foreign world where nothing is clear, these tropes anchor the game’s systems in a recognizable structure – for those familiar with Tunic’s influences, that is.

The game’s art style serves the same purpose. If Tunic had gone for a stranger aesthetic, doubling down on the horror or going for a more abstract look – something similar to Hyper Light Drifter for instance – it would have had a more consistent tone but also appeared even more impenetrable to the player. It feels like a trade-off: it asks a lot of you but, in return, it looks warm and cozy – well, until you enter the windmill for the first time, that is.

A great part of its charm also comes from its main collectible: the pages of the game’s own manual, which are wonderfully designed and drawn. And there is a lot more to these pages than it meets the eye: you may think they are just a cute touch at first, but you will eventually discover that they contain information you wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere. Tunic hides everything it can from you, and this includes even the basic actions you can perform: upgrading your stats, for example, requires a certain action to be performed near a certain structure while having another object and – while you can discover that by yourself – it’s probably by finding a page in the manual that you’ll discover that upgrades are even possible in the game.

This is the central core that moves Tunic’s design: it wants to hide things from you in plain sight. It puts strange objects in certain areas that you can access and use from the beginning – you just don’t know how to yet. When you go back from a dungeon to the overworld you may find yourself in a passageway that was partially covered by the fixed camera – a passageway that goes both ways and could have been used as a shortcut if you had only realized it was there. This type of design makes a second playthrough a fresh experience, since even though the world doesn’t change, your knowledge about it opens all sorts of options and paths.

The design of the main areas follows the same rule. They’re packed with hidden corridors, ladders, and doors that reward a player that studies the room’s layout, looking for elements that the camera, a structure, or something else may be covering up. If there’s a guard protecting an empty corner or a turret pointing to a random corridor, they are all signs that there’s something hidden in those places – the trick is always realizing that the things that didn’t appear to have a purpose at first glance indeed have one.

Take this very simple puzzle as an example. In the first picture, there’s nothing pointing out that there’s a passage in front of the fox, hidden by the shadows, but the next room has an opening right next to it, leading to a chest, telling you the secret passageway is there.

The pages of the manual also hide many secrets, hidden in the drawings or stains, including the key to decoding the alien language in which the characters speak. Tunic allows you to decide how deep you want to fall down the rabbit hole: you can just acquire the main items, defeat the final boss and call it a day – having a good, but unremarkable experience – but you can also examine the manual pages for hints about secret treasures and fairies, unlocking another ending. These secrets push you to interact more with the world, be more active during exploration, seeking patterns everywhere, from flower formations to shadows on the walls – patterns that were always there from the very beginning. And you can go even deeper, solving puzzles that require you to make a physical page to sketch on, or trying to translate the game’s strange language to better understand Tunic’s obtuse story.

For some, this story will make as much sense as Dark Souls without YouTube guides/fanfics: the protagonist will be a fox cosplaying as Link that seeks to free a bigger fox from a magical prison. This big fox could be his mother, his lover, an old friend, an ancient hero doomed to repeat their mistakes after acquiring a forbidden power, or all of the above. It’s not very compelling stuff, but it’s exploration and not plot the driving force in Tunic, so the cryptic nature of the events is by design, forming another element to be unraveled by the player.

Tunic is a game with many layers. It provides from a simple, well-designed adventure to a complex box of strange and fascinating puzzles – it all depends on how much you are willing to commit to it.

April 06, 2022.