Idle Thoughts

A clever game about the glorious days of the instruction manual (★★★★☆)

Tunic is a mashup of three games: The Legend of Zelda (the original NES one), Dark Souls and… a third one. I suppose making a reference to the third game is kind of a spoiler in and of itself, so I’ll get into it a bit later on. Consider yourself warned if you’re wary of spoilers. Anyway, all in all Tunic is a delightful little game that brings one new(ish) idea to the table.

The game’s main draw is its instruction manual. Not as a physical object, boy is that era over, but as an in-game object. Tunic is worth a try for that aspect alone. It’s obviously inspired by the Legend of Zelda’s NES manual and you find it page by page. The pages are delightfully illustrated, but are written in a made-up language and only a few words are in English (the same goes for the rest of the game, BTW). You have to parse meaning through context and pore over the little notes written in pen. The game takes that ball and really, really runs with it. The pages are printed on both sides, so you usually get information about two different things at once, because that’s how the pages of a real booklet would be stapled. You discover maps of future areas, information that would ironically have been useful a few minutes sooner, tips, hidden mechanics and much more than that. The manual is equal parts instruction booklet, strategy guide, world atlas, artbook and revelatory Holy Book. Each page feels like a more substantial treasure that anything as vulgar as a weapon, money, or other items. They offer something much more valuable: insight. The game truly understands that it is by removing affordances and by letting the players figure things out by themselves that you create an engaging experience. You have to do it right, though, and there’s the rub. Here, it is done quite well.

With that being said, the concept of the manual does give food for thought. Is removing text from a game really a brilliant innovation if none is necessary because the workings of the game are immediately obvious to a moderately experienced gamer? If you’ve played any Zelda game, you know basically what the items are and what they’re for. The hookshot-able obstacles are so obvious it’s almost painful to the eyes. You’ve got your Overworld, your Dungeons with one important item and one of the magic Gimmicks protected by a boss. From the Dark Souls side you have your monster-respawning bonfires, your Estus flask, your stamina bars, your ruined world and your morally ambiguous quest. As for the manual itself, it feels a bit odd giving high praise to a game that has a feature that literally every game used to have some years ago. To be fair, way, way more thought has been put into it than the average manual, but still, *cough, cough*, there were lots of very good manuals in the good old days, you know? Perhaps it is one of the very few things that were certifiably better in those “good old days”. Some strategy games came with manuals so thick they were practically books in their own right. You had foldable maps, equipment tables, the works. You didn’t need to pre-order to get a mini artbook, it was all right there in the manual. Plus, I now realize manuals couldn’t give away too much, but had to pack as much information as possible, as it was probably the only reference most players would have in a pre-Internet age. Oh well, it seems the manual is a lost art form.

Another stray thought. Shigeru Miyamoto said his inspiration for The Legend of Zelda was exploring the great outdoors while growing up. Tunic, then, is a game made by someone who played The Legend of Zelda as growing up.

Getting back to the subject at hand, the art style is minimalistic by design, but also probably for budget reasons. Still, it works quite nicely. There also seems to be some kind of soft focus thing going on with the camera. It feels like the game is aiming for a “diorama” look, kind of similar to what games like Octopath Traveler are doing. It’s a smart presentation concept: you can clearly evoke a feeling of nostalgia without doing anything as gauche as having the exact same graphics a 16-bit RPG would have. Plus, when you open the manual the camera zooms out, revealing the black void outside of the game screen, and the game screen itself “pixelizes”. It’s like being dragged out of an old CRT TV. Genius. The soundtrack, however, I found pretty dull. It just has that kind of inoffensive and bland airiness of “high art” electronica.

The actual combat and exploration is a fairly well-tread mix of Zelda and Dark Souls. The fundamentals are honestly better realized than I expected for a game centered around a “gimmick”. 90% of the basic secrets involve some kind of trickery with the camera angle of the “diorama”, which is clever, but not particularly fun in practice. It does however subvert the Dark Souls trope of creating shortcuts because many are already there, you just don’t know about it yet, so no “does not open from this side” is needed. The game is about the same size in scope as the first half of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which makes it quite short, but at least Tunic doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Okay, so the final third inspiration is… FEZ. Or maybe The Witness, depending on how you look at it. If you’ve played either of these, that gives you an idea of what the latter part of the game entails once the final revelation about the nature of the game is revealed. To be fair, it was truly glorious for a time: I spent two hours I should have been sleeping running around the world with this new information, seeing everything in a new light. The enchantment wore off when I realized the game just became puzzles for the sake of puzzles, with no real payoff except a check mark and a mysterious jingle. Plus, it wasn’t clear which puzzles were progressing the game and if so how, or if they were just optional. What’s a shame about this is that before that point, new insights contained in the booklet translated into advantages in combat, help during exploration or brand new mechanics. It would have been really nice if the ultimate revelations gave you game-breaking abilities for the sake of showing how you are transcending the game’s world. But yeah, like Fez or The Witness, it kind of devolves into a self-referential spiral of puzzles. Not that there’s anything wrong with puzzles, but it just seems like untapped potential.

The final “main-game” puzzle is absolutely brilliant in design, but utterly horrible in execution. It requires parsing somewhat ambiguous hints into a very, very, VERY long combination of actions, without being told what or when you’re doing something wrong. Seriously, I’d be curious to know how many people solved it without looking up the solution. It would have been easy to simplify the execution without actually watering down the concept.

Which brings me to one of those questions: who is the game actually for? It requires at least passable “souls” skills, plus the patience for abstract puzzles of an ARG enthusiast or an amateur cryptolinguist. Some knowledge of Zelda is also obviously de rigueur. One hint would only make sense to a thirty-something with experience with a specific game. Many reviewers complain that the game is “too hard”, despite the game having an accessibility option that’s basically an invincibility cheat code. So you’d think the game would actually “be” for, like, seven people, but Tunic seems quite popular nonetheless. Sometimes you can create something popular not despite choosing to stick to your concept but because you stick to it. There you go, another one of those armchair designer game lessons, just for you.

So that’s Tunic. The game is outstanding because of its spin on the booklet concept and is probably worth a shot for that alone. On the other hand, once you see through the novelty of recycling a decade-old concept, it seems there’s a little “something” extra missing for the game to reach true greatness.