Tunic Review: The Power of Imitation

At a glance, it would be easy to write off Tunic, from developer Andrew Shouldice, as an imitator. For one, it’s another spawn of The Legend of Zelda and its isometric ilk, with dungeons, heart containers, and little roadblocks that you’re supposed to come back to later with the proper item. It also is a graduate of the Dark Souls combat school, where death comes quickly if you don’t learn to roll away or parry with proper timing.

Tunic, though, is more than a mere imitation, as it focuses on the most unexpected elements of its forerunners in order to reward players with a rapturous sense of discovery. And the clearest indicator of its style lies in one of its collectibles: an in-game instruction manual that you find one out-of-order page at a time. Handsomely illustrated in full color, the manual recalls that pre-internet era of video games when we were actually expected to read these things, when your hints had to come from friends or the pages of a game magazine.

The catch, though, is that most of Tunic’s text, both in the manual and in the game world itself, isn’t in a recognizable language. Aside from some mercifully translated stretches and a few helpful doodles from a prior owner, the game’s made-up system of runic symbols is functionally gibberish. But you don’t have to translate anything in order to finish the game, whose language is more of a way to encourage experimentation. The fact that we’ve probably played something like Tunic before becomes part of puzzling out how it works.

In a broader sense, the made-up language speaks to the game’s design ethos, with your fox protagonist constantly having to discover abilities and hidden paths that were technically accessible all along. We simply do not think to try them until we discover the right page of the instruction book, or we find the more conspicuous entrance to a secret passage that loops back to the start, taking shortcuts behind the scenery that we never thought to search for.

Though Tunic is designed to lead you along an obvious path, it’s possible to stumble upon various secrets by accident. Starting the game over will allow you to use your accumulated knowledge to complete tasks more quickly and out of order, if not bypass certain parts altogether, though you may not want to given how charmingly rendered the world is here.

This sense of discovery follows through to the game’s surprisingly systemic nature, of realizing that certain interactions exist once you watch them happen. Fire can spread between objects, stealth can help you avoid certain conflicts, and sometimes enemies will harm one another in close quarters. The enemies all have shockingly competent and aggressive path-finding abilities, too, and to the point where they’ll follow you into an adjoining room or inadvertently reveal a secret entrance when they use it on the way to come get you.

As in the world of The Legend of Zelda, though, combat is the least of Tunic’s strengths. Given that you’re constrained by a small amount of equipment slots, the fighting gets irksome in the game’s final third, especially as you lose some of the upgrades that made combat less tedious over time. And while there are plenty of shortcuts that make death more of an inconvenience, a few levers to pull are easy to miss due to the game’s zoomed-out camera perspective.

With that said, these frustrations are small in the face of the game’s greater achievements. Where other isometric games of this sort heavily telegraph areas and objects that you should return to later, the levels here subtly fold in on themselves in ways that are both slyly hidden and obvious in hindsight. Tunic appears unassuming and even a little routine on the surface, but it constantly reveals how clever it is every time it encourages us to take a closer look.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by ICO Partners.