"Tunic" Review - It Says "Git Gud"

Available for: Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4 (Post-October), Playstation 5 (Post-October)

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

I'm a simple man, dear reader. I see a game where you play as a cute animal (and it's clearly not meant for children or edgelords who like Happy Tree Friends), and chances are good I'll be at least interested to see what it's all about. Announced a number of years ago, Tunic has been on my radar since the announcement for this exact reason. Well, here we are in 2022, and Tunic has released to somewhat mixed reception, from what I can tell. So...what do I think? Well, I've played through Tunic twice and reached 100% completion. Achieving these aforementioned victories meant that I spent a great deal of time (somewhere around 25-30 hours, I think) patrolling every nook and cranny, finding every treasure chest I could find, and solving every puzzle I stumbled across. "Uh, duh!" I can already hear you say, "that's how most people get 100% in a game!" Well...we'll get to what makes completion a triumph a little later. For now, let's begin with this: There are more than a couple flaws to be found in this small team's passion project, but this is a game that turned out far more compelling than I was expecting it to be, and I'd give it a heartfelt recommendation to anyone on the fence about it!

In Tunic, you play as an adorable little fox wearing, you guessed it, a tunic. Many comparisons have been made between this fox and Link from The Legend of Zelda, and it's not hard to see why, given that they both wear green and wield a small sword with a mostly-purple-with-a-little-red shield. So that's our protagonist, and when it comes to story, comparisons have been made to Dark Souls: you don't really have a clear objective from the get-go, but you have to go and ring a couple bells as you make your way through a hostile world (though this one is more cute than devastated, I'd say). Now, if you go looking for it, you're going to find a lot of lore, just don't expect to get it handed to you...and with those last four sentences out of the way, that's it for story and characters, so let's talk about the world now!

The game starts you off in in any idyllic meadow overworld with a windmill, a river, and a bunch of ladders and bridges that promise you further exploration and secrets to uncover once you can access them. This overworld is (perhaps obviously) the hub that connects the game's many biomes together, and the paths to any given biome are gated off by obstacles that you'll gradually be able to clear as you continue on your journey and unlock new equipment. In other cases, however, you might actually be able to circumvent obstacles by finding hidden paths. See, this game is presented in an isometric view similar to that of last year's Death's Door, albeit with the camera looking down from the right instead of the left. As a result, a small-but-noticeable amount of a given area is actually invisible to you. You can't turn the camera, so if you come up to a staircase going up at the bottom of the screen, you won't be able to see yourself climbing that staircase until you're at the top, to give an example of what I mean. With that in mind, the developers use what is unfortunately a negative result of the camera style to cater to and reward player curiosity. What might seem like an unreachable area that you can't get to until you get a certain item might, for example, actually be reachable just by walking behind a pillar and discovering there's a ladder you have no way of seeing that leads to that area. I remember one particular area where I made a giant circle to the right of the "bonfire" (I forget the actual name of these, but they're fires and they work like Souls bonfires) all the way around to the left. It was an action-packed journey full of enemies and treasures, and then I died right at the very end...and given that, just like in a soulslike game, you lose some (not all or even a large quantity, thankfully) of your currency upon death, that meant I had to make that journey all over again. So I did so, retrieved my gems, and finished my exploration of that last part of the map. So why do I tell this story at this time? Because simply by walking the last part of this area, I ended up emerging from a secret tunnel immediately to the left of the bonfire....I could have gone back and gotten my gems a lot easier had I tried looking for a hidden path. This kind of experience is absolutely everywhere in this game, and in terms of exploration, I believe this design philosophy works quite well in making the experience consistently fun...in other parts of the game, though? Not so much. But we'll get to that in a second. As I've alluded to already, this game is filled to the brim with secrets, so I'd like to talk a bit about those. Firstly, there are gems. These are found in treasure chests, and they're pretty self-explanatory: you use them to purchase items and upgrades. Then, there are those aforementioned upgrades. Also found in treasure chests, these 6 separate kinds of items each upgrade one of your 6 stats (health, stamina, magic, attack, defense, and potion effectiveness). When selected as an offering at a bonfire alongside a certain amount of gems, the respective stat gets upgraded. Next, there are cards. As you might be able to guess, these are cards...fine, they have pictures on them and you can equip them. The pictures give a vague idea of what effect a given card might have when equipped, but only certain pages of the manual will straight up tell you what pictures mean what. We'll return to the manual soon. But for now, let's go to the last major treasure you can find: coins. Up until that last sentence, I'd been calling gems "coins," and I only realized my mistake when I remembered that coins are an entirely different thing. Basically, you'll find wishing wells throughout the world, and for every couple coins you toss in there, you'll earn a new slot to equip a card in. There are also other things like finite health and magic restoration items, but they're not really worth talking about. So, what remains is the best collectible in the game: the game's manual. See, you start out with literally nothing. No controls, no map, nothing. But you rectify this by finding pages of the manual scattered throughout the world, and in order to achieve the true ending, you have to put together the whole thing. Not only do these manual pages provide layouts, treasure locations, and hints for some of the game's hardest puzzles, they also come together to provide the single greatest puzzle experience I've had in any game in years. I wish I could elaborate, but part of the joy of solving this puzzle is having the a-ha moment that starts it all and working it all out from there. So now that we've covered the many secrets and items you can discover, it's time to talk about the downside to the game's intentionally-obscuring design philosophy: it actively detracts from the enjoyment of finding secrets. If you're trying to get as many secrets as you can, you'll find yourself rubbing up against every surface you come across on the off chance that there's a hidden nook or cranny to slip into, and as a result, you don't frequently feel like you found a secret with your brain, just through process of elimination. 

Now let's talk about gameplay. Three buttons on your controller are used for "actions." So, if you press the y or triangle button, for instance, whatever you have mapped to that button will be used. If it's a weapon, you'll attack with that weapon. If it's a magic item, you'll cast whatever magic attack you've mapped. If it's a health/magic/stamina consumable, you probably get the gist. Realistically, one of those slots will be used for your sword and at least one of the others will be reserved for a magic attack, so let's talk about gameplay with that layout as our context. Gameplay can best be described as "simple, but not easy." You'll attack with your sword and cast spells to damage enemies, use a dodge roll and shield to avoid damage to yourself, and use a limited quantity of refillable health potions to restore health when necessary. All pretty standard stuff, so the key to getting through Tunic is to master this simplistic system as best you can. Actually, there's one aspect of the gameplay unique to this game, and that's how it uses its stamina meter. You can attack as much as you want and it doesn't cost stamina, but dodge rolls do, and if you just start attacking willy-nilly after a dodge, the stamina you spent won't start regenerating until you take a little break. With this in mind, if you're playing fast and loose, you can end up depleting your stamina all the way pretty quickly. The kicker? When your stamina is that low, you take drastically increased damage. Given that some of the battles can get fast-paced, if you aren't careful, you're going to put yourself in a position to be brutally punished for mistakes. So, part of that aforementioned mastering of the simplicity is keeping your head cool and approaching these difficult battles calmly enough to keep from becoming vulnerable. If you're the kind of person who just wants to play a fun game with a cute fox and this is all sounding a little too difficult, all is not lost. Tunic comes with a couple of accessibility switches that you can flip on or off at will: no stamina restrictions, and "no failure mode." The former turns the stamina system off altogether, while the no failure mode means you take no damage. And I know you didn't ask, but yes, I do take great pleasure in knowing this fact makes Hardcore Gamers (TM) screech in impotent rage! So rest assured, dear reader, if you just wanna be a cute little fox and wind down at the end of a stressful work day, this game will work for you. And you know what? If these accessibility settings weren't there, my final score for Tunic would probably be a couple points lower than it's going to be, and this is because of two sections that, unfortunately, weren't any fun.

Remember how I alluded to 100% completion being a triumph for a particular, then-undisclosed reason in the introduction? Well, this is the reason: the mine section and one late-game section. In the mine section, you come into contact with some kind of radioactive substance that drains your hp down to 1, no matter how many upgrades you've acquired. As you make your way through this segment, you come up against several of the game's more intelligent enemies, all of whom now have the ability to kill you in one hit. The whole point of this is to test your ability to avoid/negate damage under pressure, which is understandable in a game like this. However, what could've been a tough-but-fair challenge actually ends up being kind of nauseating because of the visual and audio effects that come with this radioactive substance. The screen becomes a glaringly bright purple and white mixture and the soundscape becomes this screeching horror monstrosity, and it's 100% unpleasant to experience in addition to being a woeful distraction from the gameplay. What this means in practice is that you'll end up getting further and further in each attempt, and each time you fail you have to do the gauntlet all over again....that is, unless you turn on no fail mode, which I eventually ended up doing. Again, there's no shame at all in turning that mode on, especially when it becomes vital to not actively loathing this game. I won't say too much about that late game area I mentioned for the sake of spoilers, but this section once again offers the player a unique challenge: fighting the game's toughest enemies with beginning-of-the-game stats. Arguably it's fair for a game like this to take away your upgrades for a little bit to test your basic gameplay skills, but in practice, I found it incredibly obnoxious. I worked hard and did a lot of exploring for these upgrades, and it felt like a cheap way to artificially inflate difficulty for a prolonged period of time. In my second playthrough, I actively dreaded having to go through these two sections, and that's a pretty damning take on the game's replayability.

Obviously I covered a little bit of the tech side of things in that last paragraph with the discussion of the mine section, but how does the rest of the game fare from a technical standpoint? Well, pretty good, as it turns out! I never had any crashes, texture pop-in, framerate drops, audio glitches, AI malfunctions, etc. That isn't to say it's a perfect package: there were a handful of times where I simply fell through the levels and died for seemingly no reason...but given that you only lose a little bit of currency upon death instead of all of it like in a Souls title, this was hardly even an inconvenience. So, really not a lot to say on the negative side. One thing I'd like to take some time to point out, however, is the soundtrack. This being a game with a lot of backtracking, you're going to hear the same couple soundtrack pieces over and over again, and I never thought that was a problem in Tunic. Each of the pieces are high quality and varied enough that at best they were a joy to revisit and at worst they didn't get in the way. So, kudos to composer Lifeformed for their work!

The fact that Tunic released to somewhat mixed reception is no surprise to me, dear reader. Depending on your expectations going in, you could be in for a good time or a bit of a headache. My two cents? The headachy bits of the game can easily be remedied via the accessibility settings. So, as I've already said, if you just wanna play as a cute fox for a while, you'll have a good time with this game. And on the other hand, if you crave a challenge, Tunic offers more than a little of that in spite of its cute aesthetic, so I'd say even "hardcore gamers" might enjoy it. For my money, Tunic is an adorable and fun little indie gem filled with some of the most engagingly retro puzzles I've experienced this year, and if you get the chance to give it a shot, I don't think you'll be disappointed if you do!

Let us review:

-side effects of camera angle - 0.5

-mine and late game sections - 1.0

-occasional bug - 0.2

The final score for Tunic is...

8.3/10 - Great

Excellent work, Andrew Shouldice, excellent work!