Reviewed on Xbox Series X
If you're anything like me, you saw Tunic a couple years ago in a xbox showcase about upcoming indie games and you thought to yourself, "Oh its like Zelda but with a cute little fox". And I can't say that I blame you, everything that we were shown prior to this game releasing had us thinking it was going to be a cute little game where you play a silent character with a sword where you have to go around exploring and saving the princess. And you're not wrong, but you're also not right.
I downloaded Tunic the day it came out and was looking forward to a quick little, 8-10 hour game, that I could also let my 7-year-old daughter play. Nothing too complicated, but fun nonetheless. But what I got was a nostalgic bast that teleported me to 1997. One of the main gimmicks of Tunic is the fact that you have no idea what is going on. 99% of the game is in a made up language that you can't read. There also is no in-game tutorial telling you what to do, you kind of get dropped in and told to figure it out.
Part of how you figure out what you need to do and how to progress in the game, is you find pages of a book, stylized to look like a game manual. This is honestly the most addicting and fascinating part of the game. Hunting down pages and figuring out what you need to do and where you need to go. You have some abilities that are available at the start, but you have no idea they exist until you find a page that lays it out for you. This is the mechanic that makes me feel like a kid again. Suddenly I'm in my living room in 1997, wearing my Ninja Turtle pajamas and trying to play a game I know nothing about without reading the manual first. I finally get frustrated, take out the manual, and realize I was approaching a situation totally wrong. Even if the manual is in this lost language, they still give you everything you need to figure it out.
Tunic trusts you as a player...
This can be frustrating but is also refreshing. Tunic trusts you as a player to be able to use your context clues and figure it out. There is no hand holding in Tunic. Some games achieve this just by making the game super hard and difficult. Tunic achieves this by trusting you to use your wits and what you have discovered before. The former seems cheap and lazy compared to the latter. And that isn't to say Tunic isn't difficult, it absolutely is. You will die a lot in Tunic. But it always seems fair.
The plot of Tunic takes several twists and turns as you play. It starts as a cute little fox exploring this little island and it evolves over the course of the game to deal with destiny, exploitation, and maybe a little bit about the depravity of man. Without getting too much into spoilers, there are two endings in Tunic. The first is known as the "bad ending" while the second is known as the "good ending". The nice thing is, almost everyone gets the bad ending, but you are able to keep playing in order to achieve the good ending. In order to get to the good ending, you have to find every single page of the manual and figure out this absolutely insane puzzle, that I honestly have no idea how anyone can figure it out without the help of the internet.
Something that shouldn't go without mention is the accessibility features of Tunic. You can turn off the stamina meter to make the game a bit easier and if needed, you can turn on no fail mode where your health is never depleted. While Tunic is hard and figuring out its puzzles are difficult, I never felt like Tunic was punishing me for being bad.
Conclusion
Tunic is my favorite game of 2022. In addition to what I've discussed above, the graphics are always great to look at and the audio is so good. The soundtrack is on Spotify and I highly recommend giving it a listen. It's even more mind blowing when you find out that this game was mostly made by one man. Initially Tunic launched on Xbox Gamepass and Steam but is now available on Playstation and Switch. You are doing yourself a disservice if you do not set aside some time to dive into this world. Tunic is my 2022 Game of the Year.