Mostly Normal Monthly #0014, February 2023
Check out our Tunic Special Edition
Tunic
What made Tunic James’ Game of the Year?
Tunic was one of the best games to grace 2022 but it does it on the coattails of nostalgia. For those of you who did not grow up playing games in the 80s or 90s, this charming fox adventure may not hit the same as it would for those in the cartridge era.
When Canadian developer Andrew Shouldice set out to make the fox based indie game, he wanted to create a game about the “secrets of exploring”. He said, “I wanted to really hide things and give people the real sensation of exploring, like when they were a kid." He nailed this in spades. The thing that this simple looking adventure game does more than anything is show the players how secrets have existed right in front of them by playing with their expectations. I will admit that when I first saw this game I wasn’t impressed, but after playing it for a few hours via Game Pass, I was in love with it.
What the game does incredibly well is reveal these secrets in an incremental way by having you find pages to the game’s instruction manual spread across the land. This manual is straight out of the 90’s stylized in the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) landscape style complete with passwords/notes page with someone’s notes written in. The manual is only the first step of the puzzle though, because once you find the pages you must then decipher them, as they are written, for the most part, in a cryptic language unique to the world of root. I kept a notepad by my side while I played through this little gem and loved how the game transported me back to a time where a pen and pad of paper were mandatory for me playing games. To note passwords, secrets, or note paths in a maze. It was a time when my reading ability was limited and so half the game booklet was illegible to me, so I had to decipher what I didn’t know through the imagery.
We didn’t have tutorial levels back on the NES, so the games would use the manual to provide instructions, as well as story background, maps, and enemy information that might not be apparent to first time players. For example, in the Super Mario Bros. 3 manual there are images with Mario conducting actions and highlighted controller inputs. I didn’t need to read to understand what to do in these situations and the way Tunic does this is very similar.
One of the first pages you find give the player a plethora of information as well as setting up a few mysteries. It denotes health and stamina bars, shows your equipped items and available potions. However it sows the seed of intrigue with certain object on the screen described as a question mark and notes that more information is available on page 41. While the action of the game takes place in a beautiful Legend of Zelda meets Dark Souls world, the real majesty of this game lies on the hidden pages of our instruction manual.
For those who are not nostalgic or wasn’t a gamer in this era of games and instruction booklets this game might not hit the same as it did for me but the absolute charm and wonder of this world is well worth the investment. It has some challenging combat sections but if you’d prefer to bypass them to further explore the world that are invulnerability options to do so, allowing all kinds of players to enjoy the game. This was my personal game of the year for 2022 and I wholeheartedly recommend it for those growing up on The Legend of Zelda and cartridge based retro games.
Tunic, to be Continued
By Chris Stern
Designed/Developed by Andrew Shouldice (@dicey)
Published by Finji
Reviewed on Xbox Series X via Game Pass
I first learned of Tunic during E3 2017 – I fell for the beautiful bait of an isometric Zelda-like from the trailer during the Xbox press conference. Especially at a time when it felt like Xbox couldn’t put an exclusive game on their platform that wasn’t Gears of War or Forza. Developed largely by a single person – Andrew Shouldice – Tunic took another five years to release.
In that time, the Nintendo released an aesthetically similar remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and I thought Tunic’s lunch was eaten. I mean, the game is called freaking TUNIC, so the initial sell had to be, “Hey, you. Yeah you, you guy. You like ZELDA?” I had also finally gotten into the Souls games and fell in love with FromSoftware’s oblique narratives, interconnected world designs, and chunky dodge-rolls. I also learned the fun and stress of a good corpse run – I love the joy and despair of trying to make it back to the place I died to get my stuff back!
It surprises and delights me that it is not the retro homage nor the Souls-ish elements that made Tunic special. What makes Tunic more than just well-designed cosplay? Well… that’s a secret. Tunic is designed to hide and obfuscate as much information as possible. It is a game overflowing with secrets – and its high points come from the eureka moments peppered throughout as you discover them. The game’s writing is almost entirely in an inscrutable language. There are mechanics that you have access to for the whole game, but only become obvious once you receive the instruction manual page associated with them – oh yeah, the game has a lovingly rendered instruction manual that you interact with in game – I’ll get back to that soon.
The brilliant part of Tunic is that Shouldice uses the fact that it is “Just another isometric Zelda-like, bro” to the player’s benefit. All the mysteries and (frankly kind of arbitrary) difficulty would be incredibly off-putting if I didn’t know that the little fox should go in the cave and find… well not a sword, but a stick. Tunic uses the legacy of the entire Zelda series in order to be scrutable at all and builds on that foundation with layer after layer of fun mystery.
My true highlight of the game was discovering the in-game manual page by page. The beautiful 2d art as well as the incredibly helpful hints contained in those pages kept me paging through that virtual booklet all throughout the game. Frankly, the manual mechanic sets Tunic apart from its peers. I wish that a physical version of the manual was available in a special edition of the game, but sadly that would also spoil a tremendous amount of the game.
Oh yeah – I forgot to mention, the music, and visual design all kick butt, too. Plus, it uses the isometric camera to create puzzles opportunities that evoke Monument Valley of all games. I do have my gripes with Tunic, don’t get me wrong, but its ability to drip-feed players discovery after discovery sets the game head and shoulders above other Zelda wannabes.