Just going to start this out right here: It is a shame that this beautiful amazing game shipped weeks away from Elden Ring and (likely) in the same year as the sequel to Breath of the Wild, because this game absolutely deserves so many Game of the Year awards.

I honestly can’t think of any game with the same kind of presentation or vibe as Tunic. Yes, at its surface level it’s a chill synthwave Zelda clone with a cute little fox. Yes, I just played one of these in Death’s Door. . . but the presentation and vibe are what sets Tunic apart from everything else out there.

A year ago Cyber Shadow presented “what if there was another Ninja Gaiden game that everybody missed?” In that game, the presentation, gameplay, difficulty, soundtrack, everything is spot-on, as if that game was just “discovered” and dumped.

Tunic is different. In the 80s and early 90s it wasn’t impossible to find a weird import game at a flea market or local game shop. Or a game that was lightly localized. Or really badly localized. That’s just how things were. The gameplay experience Tunic provides is the joy of how you remember such a game being. The better graphics, slick gameplay, amazing modern soundtrack and so on are the juiced-up 2am sugar-tinged memories of getting on the phone with your friends and comparing notes about what weird secret you just found.

I’m pretty sure I’m not just crazy here. I think this is intentional. The game’s manual is written primarily in Moonspeak with the occasional snippets of English. When you pull up the fragmented pages of the manual the zoomed out view of the game gets rendered like it’s being played back on a crt, with a lower-res game in there. This would make sense, as the time spent pouring over the manual the focus of your memory would be on the manual not the game behind it.

Tunic is basically two games and both are outstanding and world-class. The surface level is a stellar Zelda-style Action RPG. Overworld, Secrets, Dungeons, Keys, Bosses, Upgrades, Traversal, the whole gamut. I mentioned in my preview of the demo last year that it’s a slower and more deliberate paced game. There’s not as much focus on parries or counters, just positioning and iframes from dodging. It’s great, the pacing is great, the story’s great, it’s perfect, world-class, and absurdly good for such a small studio. And a legitimately small studio, unlike Death’s Door that had a whole slate of contractors helping out.

What really sets it apart is the other game. Interwoven throughout the ARPG is an equally world-class ARG-Style Mystery / Puzzle game. The meta-game is doled out to you over time through finding pages of the manual in-game. It’s completely integrated, half the “powers” and “upgrades” in the game are knowledge that gets explained outright or hinted-to in the manual. Like teleporting, you see all these pads across the map and they pretty clearly look like teleport pads, and I was expecting an upgrade but no, it’s just “hold A long enough”. Same thing for the “Golden Path”, which becomes the focus of the second half of the game.

There’s a ton of variety in the puzzles, too, ranging from “find a hidden chest” to “comprehend an alien language”. But unlike a lot of games, all the answers are in game, and shockingly few (if any?) of them actually require knowledge of the language. In Fez a lot of it was completely inscrutable until you understood the language. Similarly, in The Witness, until you understood the Deep Knowledge of the game you were just sorta fumbling through. Tunic is way more direct, but doesn’t lose anything.

It’s good all the way through. I beat the game yesterday and dug into spoilers. Now I’m a good portion of the way towards wrapping the game 100%. It’s the best game I’ve played in a long time. There’s nothing on the horizon apart from Breath of the Wild 2 that I expect to be better.

2022-03-26 – Tunic (Addendum)⌗

100%’ed. Outstanding. Puzzles were all* absolutely a joy. These are spoilers. Don’t read these.

Favorite Puzzle: Startropics callback. Page 51 has iconography of “quietly” putting a letter in water to reveal a hidden message. Page 1 (the last page of the game) has a “letter” from the dev team, with the addendum “Do not dispose of or eat this document!”. Take it to one of the few areas in-game where you can stand in water (also depicted on this page), stand in the water (to “immerse” the letter) for 60 seconds, but with the game sound off to be “quiet”. Doing so reveals a game-language haiku:

THE SOFTEST FEATHER (down)
CORRECTED ELEVEN TIMES (right x11)
DEPARTED ONCE MORE (left x12)

Amazing.

Worst Achievement: “Too Cute to Smash”. Have 10 piggybanks in your inventory at once. This is hands down my least-favorite kind of achievement: It’s secret and there’s nothing ingame referring to it at all. It’s missable, there are 13-ish of these things in the game, and they’re rewarding – they have cash in them. Soon as you pop 4 of them it’s over. Ok cool, so screw it, do it in NG+. Wellll NG+ resets them, they don’t carry over, and NG+ nukes your blink ability. And four of them are in locations that – barring any alien tech from speedrunners – require the blink ability. So you have to replay the whole goddamn game. Terrible.