Tunic Review: By the Book
Tunic spends so much time looking to the past that it fails to balance the gameplay elements within, burying a beautiful idea behind messy combat.
In the opening scene of Tunic, the main character, an adorable little fox clothed in green, wakes up on a beach. “So, I’m Link” was my first thought. It’s a comparison the game encourages throughout. Breaking pots for money, collecting pieces of great power, finding fairies scattered throughout the world. The developers (or developer, Tunic was mostly developed by one man) aren’t just paying homage, they are cutting whole cloth from the DNA of Legend of Zelda, clothing your little fox in loving cosplay.
Tunic has love in spades for the Zelda series. Specifically, those of the NES and SNES. At the heart of Tunic is an attempt to recreate a lost experience in modern games. One where you had to rely on handwritten notes, and game guides from the developer. Along your journey, you will find many collectibles, the most important of which are pages to an in-game manual. Each page has important tips and tricks on how to progress through the game. Tunic’s gimmick is that most of the pages are written in a gibberish language unknown to the reader.
You find yourself relying on visual cues from cute little drawings (recreations of those in old Zelda guides) or notes written in the margins. These pages present themselves to you out of order, doling out their story in little bits and pieces like a bread crumb trail encouraging you to go a little deeper. This manual is Tunic’s main mechanic, not in that it is what you will spend most of your time on but rather in that it is the most interesting aspect of the game.
Yet to collect each page and bind together the manual the game puts several roadblocks in the form of its minute-to-minute gameplay. Not surprisingly, to save the Zelda-like figure you must navigate through a handful of dungeons which culminate in boss fights. These bosses hit hard. Difficulty in games can have a purpose, who doesn’t like a challenge.
A hard boss can be purposeful, a tip to players that they need to refine their skill, or maybe they are just under-leveled. Tunic’s bosses present a massive challenge spike that other combat in the game does not come near, and I found myself hitting my head against the wall trying to beat the first boss after numerous attempts. I had learned its patterns, I had leveled to the recommended stats I found on one manual page, yet the boss showed no signs of faltering to my sword. I only beat the first boss by a fluke, glitching myself out of the arena and hitting it from a safe space.
The game seemingly presents fairness to bosses in the form of stats and upgrades. In tandem with the difficulty of the bosses these mark Tunic’s attempt to pull from Soulslike games. Yet it marks one of the game’s biggest failures. Working to upgrade in Tunic is not a fun task, but something the game forces you to do if you want to progress.
Then in the last section of the game, you are stripped of all your upgrades or all but one type of upgrade. The game sees fit to let you keep the number of hearts you have, something that you could have spent money upgrading. Yet if like me you focused on other stats like magic, attack power, or health then you are given no mercy.
Upgrades in Souls games are fun because any build is valid, yet Tunic communicates quickly that there was a correct choice in how you build your character. At the end of this long, depowered section there is a boss rush. This brought any momentum the game builds up towards its conclusion to a screeching halt. It also takes away the joy of the final fight in the game, which goes down with no trouble compared to the challenge past bosses presented.
But this game isn’t about combat. Some have argued that you should play on the included no-fail mode to enjoy the game. It doesn’t value making combat as enjoyable as it does building out its true endgame. The Golden Path is a puzzle the player can only piece together after collecting nearly every manual page and then using some real-world puzzle solving.
Once I reached the point where solving The Golden Path was the only thing left, it took about an hour to complete the puzzle. And it is a fun puzzle. The issue lies in how the game makes the player commit to playing poorly handled combat for several hours just to get the joy of playing the real game, an hour or so long puzzle in the form of the game-manual.
Much has been written about the manual. It evokes the times when you would import a game from Japan with the manual and must piece together what to do by images. The game captures what it’s like to play a game as a younger sibling, retracing the steps of someone who did this all before. And it is a very clever mechanic, it is a shame that it is bundled into a Zelda-like with frustrating combat and poor pacing.
Many games feed on our collective nostalgia for games of a certain time. The best of these show that they don’t just have a love for the games they are being influenced by but have a deep mechanical understanding of what makes them good. Shovel Knight is a fine-tuned platformer in the vein of Ducktales. Hollow Knight understands the Metroidvania genre more than any other game in recent memory. Tunic fails to reach this level despite having a wonderfully original idea within it. It falters because it is too focused on paying homage, and not enough on understanding what precisely made it good and how to emulate that. It’s hard to see red flags when wearing rose-colored glasses.