Tunic

Tunic is the game that bridges the gap between Zelda and Dark Souls. In terms of vibes, it's all Zelda -- just look at that little fox's outfit! -- but the gameplay borrows from both influences evenly. I see it as a spiritual brother to Death's Door. Death's Door leans a bit more Souls, Tunic leans a bit more Zelda.

The real star here is the world design. Every area is well considered, neither too big nor too small, and they all feel like part of one big place. It's true that the map itself is a clear riff off classic Zelda, complete with a mountain to the north, but hey, if a developer can take a good design and make it feel fresh, who am I to complain? I also love how the isometric design is used intentionally to hide shortcuts in plain sight. If you like Dark Souls-style shortcuts, you're gonna love some of these.

Much hullabaloo has been made about the in-game manual, and I must agree that it's an awesome addition, especially to gamers like me who used to flip through NES manuals like they were sacred texts. In a lesser game it could come off as a gimmick, but in Tunic it feels like icing on top of an already delectable experience.

Why only four stars, then? Well, combat is serviceable rather than great. The lock-on system feels a slightly at odds with the isometric POV -- it's a bit too easy to get locked onto a distant enemy when there's one right in your face. Given that the player can have both melee and projectile weapons equipped at the same time, I can see why it works this way, but that hardly makes me feel less annoyed when my sword swings in the wrong direction.

The other issue for me has to do with pacing and the true ending. Simply put, the basic ending is unsatisfying, while getting the real ending involves solving an intricate puzzle that delves too far into Fez territory for my liking. I can't knock the game too much for this, though, because the puzzles are well designed and I respect the amount of thought the development team put into them.

Though it wears its influence on its sleeve, Tunic still manages to feel unique, like more than just a tribute. It strikes a perfect balance between nostalgia and modern game design. Don't miss it.

Over the past few years, I’ve used a plethora of positive adjectives to describe Dark Souls. Deep, rich, revolutionary, challenging, spell-binding, sublime, life-affirming: these words only scratch the surface of the exaltation I’ve given to FromSoft’s seminal action-RPG series. However, one delectable description I would NEVER earnestly give Dark Souls under any context is cute. Actually, the franchise is fairly grotesque. The franchise prides itself on upholding a grim, pensive atmosphere marked by the immense decay of the game’s world and all of its inhabitants with little hopeful reprieve. Gigantic, rabid rats, Blighttown swamp ogres, the demons residing in the volcanic ruins, to the often emaciated state of the main protagonist will all turn off each player’s collective appetites. Don’t even get me started on the pulpy, arcane grotesqueries from Dark Soul’s gothic cousin Bloodborne. In the more sexual context of the word cute, I can’t think of a better example of a moment in gaming that made everyone’s penises retract in fear and disgust like an alarmed hermit crab than the reveal of the bottom half of the supermodel spider beast Quelaag. It’s as if the developers were pulling a sick prank on the player, swiftly reminding them that nothing in Dark Souls is pretty or pristine. Fortunately, Dark Souls doesn’t have to be cute, for the impact the series has had seems to translate its idiosyncratic mechanics rather than its aesthetic attributes. Indie developer Finji decided to see what “cute Dark Souls” would look like with their 2022 title Tunic, and it translates fairly well.

I should also add that Tunic takes more than a liberal helping of elements from The Legend of Zelda as well. This second parent in Tunic’s genetic code shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the article of clothing is the dress of choice for the plucky fox protagonist depicted on the game’s cover art, mirroring the hero of time’s iconic wardrobe like an excitable kid on Halloween. Besides The Fox’s outfit as a cheeky reference to Link, Tunic’s gameplay is a marriage between Dark Souls and Zelda, which is a concise relationship because Dark Souls comprises plenty of Zelda’s gameplay attributes itself. However, I did say that Tunic’s gameplay featured a fusion from both series as opposed to sedimentary layers building onto Zelda’s gameplay supporting its descendants at the bottom. Tunic borrows the Soulslike combat, level design, and difficulty curve, but what does Zelda contribute to the game’s foundation? Tunic’s developers seem to have dipped their feet into classic Zelda philosophy of relatively free-reign exploration, a significant mark that divides the top-down 2D games and the more linear, narrative-focused 3D titles. With this slurry of gameplay elements, the developers evidently wished to craft Tunic as a sprawling adventure title with thin limitations on roaming around the intricate world that is filled to the brim with surprises.

While Tunic’s influences are an important factor of its general make up, my starting thesis on this game was based on how it formulated something adorable from the Dark Souls foundation that was originally glum and twistedly malformed. From the first screen of Tunic, it should be obvious how the game’s art direction diverges from any aesthetical property in Dark Souls. The fantasy land of Tunic’s setting looks like it's composed entirely of rubber along with its inhabitants, but in a child-like bouncy castle way instead of its grayish organic material. It’s a wonder that enemies don’t make squeaking sounds upon being struck by The Fox’s sword. Everything from the assorted trees and tall grasses, the steep hills, and towering structures resembles the pieces of an intricate playset. It’s reminiscent of the cartoonishly bulbous visual style Nintendo implemented for the Link’s Awakening remake on the Switch, except that Tunic doubles down on consistently depicting everything with a cherubic tint as opposed to only certain elements. Yet, all of the arcane edifices across Tunic’s world still seem grand and imposing. Tunic’s art direction strikes a tasteful balance between the strikingly sublime and the endearingly whimsical. Also, The Fox who vicariously gives the player a grand tour of this world is definitely a contender for the cutest video game protagonist next to Kirby, Yoshi, and Yoku from Yoku’s Island Express. While the visual aspects of Tunic are obviously constructed to make the game look charmingly adorable, the game’s atmosphere surprisingly exudes an ethereal mystique. Because a game that features such soft, spongy aesthetics carries this sense of wonder, it shows that Tunic’s presentation has layers.

Tunic’s taking of Zelda’s sense of exploration is readily apparent from the starting screen. The fox awakens on a beachy shore with zero context of where he is with less of a clue of which direction to take. What the player can figure out for themselves is they are in dire need of a weapon to defend themselves with, as the flopping land tadpoles and the piggish, Ganon-esque knights seen in the overworld are not the friendly sort. This first quest to procure one’s means of both offense and defense should provoke memories of the first Legend of Zelda title, as Link is dropped into the fray of Hyrule without the necessary tools to survive. Or, it could also conjure up recollections of the Chosen Undead scurrying around the boss in the Northern Undead Asylum before being granted with weapons, an opening sequence that is most certainly influenced by the initial state of vulnerability from the first Zelda game. Unlike both of those games, there isn’t an old man in a nearby cave to pass off his sword out of concern, nor are his devices in the close quarters of an enclosed area like the asylum in Dark Souls. The Fox has to make due with a pitiable stick as his first weapon before reaching the sacred grounds of the sword, and he doesn’t obtain his shield to accompany the sword on his opposite hand until after the first boss is defeated. The supplementary length to obtain the sword and shield is indicative of Tunic’s habit of keeping the player in the dark. Tunic is intentionally cryptic like classic Zelda and Dark Souls, but Tunic seems to amplify the esoteric elements to an absurd degree. On top of having the player roam around the map like a buzzing fly due to a lack of direction, the developers have pulled a Christian Vander (the drummer and leader of the French progressive rock band Magma) and constructed their own language to detail the game’s various attributes. Don’t bother breaking out the Rosetta Stone because it’s all a mesh of cuneiform hieroglyphics that even the developers couldn’t decipher. Of course, this chicken scratch gibberish purposefully obscures any context clues to maintain that aura of ambiguity. Because the game tears away at any hope of easy answers, every step in Tunic can be super miscalculated. I mostly appreciate the effort to foster a relatively non-linear environment ala Zelda 1, but some aspects of this direction aren’t accommodating. Because Tunic features a fixed wide-view camera perspective, it’s difficult for the player to peek at cracks to excavate in the 3D landscape, and some of them are pertinent paths to progression. Also, whenever The Fox does find himself in a cramped crevice, the silhouette the player sees doesn’t really aid in guiding them through it. Meticulously looking for the right path is difficult enough on its own.

How does one have any hope to navigate through the world of Tunic if everything seems so obtuse? Pressing the select button will pop up the game’s manual, a 56 page guide to conquering every challenge and uncovering every hidden secret. Once again, a sweet wash of nostalgia should rush through any player of a certain age because the in-game manual is an homage to the physical manuals, magazine walkthroughs, and strategy guides that gamers of yore were forced to seek out when a game threw them for a loop. The manual’s pages are strewn across Tunic’s overworld as a core collectible, and each page is stacked with hints from head-to-toe on the intricacies found in the game. It sounds like a blessing, but the rotten caveat is that most of the manual’s contents are written in the developer’s made-up mumbo-jumbo language. The manual’s details regarding the thorough history of the game’s lore, information on the various trinkets and goodies, and how to navigate through the more sprawling area of the hub and its surroundings are muddled in linguistic nonsense. Some of the contents of the manual have splotches of English so the player doesn’t have to discern the tips and tricks solely by visual context. Gee, thanks developers. Now I’ll breeze through this game in no time. Also, a virtual manual does not translate to the same kind of utility that a physical manual did, as it’s quicker to bookmark a notable page and open it while playing a game instead of flipping through pages with the D-pad. At the end of the day, the utility of the manual is negated by the advent of the internet, the destroyer of all antiquated larks that was not available in the time when physical gaming aid was relevant. Whether or not you believe the manual is useful or not, one still can’t deny that it features some gorgeous illustrations.

Still, the manual does adequately depict each step of the game’s progression, albeit construed in an asinine manner. The fox’s first primary quest is to ring two colossal bells on opposite sides of the map. Sound familiar? As if swiping the combat and the cryptic exploration from Dark Souls wasn’t enough, Tunic also copies the game’s first quest as well. No, the player will not witness what Quelaag would look like as a buxom balloon animal complete with tasteful censorship before ringing the second bell. In fact, traveling from one side of the map to the other doesn’t display the same type of descending progression that made the bell ringing quest from Dark Souls so invigorating either. What keeps Tunic from plunging into the cheap imitation territory is that it has constructed the same type of level progression. I’ve always been in awe of how each individual area of any FromSoft developed Soulslike game treats progression and checkpoints, and it’s even more impressive when another developer implements them competently. From the starting point of an area’s shrine, Tunic’s rendition of the bonfires, checkpoints are technically dispersed via shortcuts. The fox will unlatch bridges and unlock doors after a certain point to use indefinitely if the challenges prove to be too hectic and he dies as a result. The player is met with the same level of satisfaction and relief skating past former obstacles along the way to the goal in the exact same way it’s presented in Dark Souls. As for the second quest involving procuring three differently colored jewels to open a gate, this quest is seen across so many games that no one can determine its origin point (although both Zelda and Dark Souls feature a similar quest quite often).

One thing that Tunic leaves alone is the RPG mechanics from Dark Souls. The Fox will leave behind the remnants of his mortal shell at his last place of dying, but recovering it only replenishes a small sum of money lost. Still, the gold and blue doubloons are valuable because The Fox will need the heaping amount of items to use at his disposal. Many of the items can be found in treasure chests on the field, but the player will most likely burn through them and have to purchase them from the skeletal spirit merchant found in the overworld’s windmill. It’s with this aspect of the game that the Zelda influence eclipses Dark Souls, for the plethora of items The Fox has in its inventory is meant to diversify combat and puzzle solving as opposed to being nifty in slight circumstances in Dark Souls. The phantom merchant sells offensive weapons such as fire bombs and dynamite so that The Fox can blast away at groups of enemies from afar, while the freeze bomb can be used to subdue stronger singular enemies by encasing them in a coat of ice for a brief period. Fruits of the plum and berry variety restore health and magic respectively, while the more elusive hot pepper increases The Fox’s attack power. For my money, the most useful item the merchant has in stock is the decoy doll, which enemies will center on with as much focus as a cat has for a laser pointer. All of these items are meant to supplement the primary sword weapon, while the other primary weapons The Fox obtains could arguably replace the sword. The player could easily swap all of their melee eggs into the magic basket after a certain point in the game. The Magic Staff pelts enemies with an abundant amount of energy bullets while the ice daggers can freeze enemies just as effectively as the ice bomb item. Eventually, The Fox will come across a shotgun to blast away enemies with magic power at close range, and yes, the image of wee little Fox using a shotgun is as hilariously mismatched as it sounds. The Grapple Hook’s usage for traversal is fairly self-explanatory if you’ve ever played even one Zelda game, but it can also be used to lasso in enemies who annoyingly insist on attacking at long range. With one of the ability cards, the player can swap their health-restoring potions for mana restoration. The choice of magic over melee is as close as Tunic gets to a role-playing option with combat, and the pervasive range of magic items present here helped me escape my melee build comfort zone I usually abide by in Soulslike games. It reminds me more of Zelda because those games encourage using everything the player has at their disposal, while Dark Souls usually forces the player to be faithful to one playstyle.

I had to diversify my playstyle in Tunic more drastically because the game’s bosses are the true sources of agonizing defeat. Enemies in Tunic vary in viciousness, but each boss is a bitch and a half. The Guard Captain is a gigantic copy of his tinier minions The Fox has been fighting, so dealing with him is a cakewalk. However, the mighty mechanical duo of the Garden Knight and Siege Engine The Fox fights sequentially serve as the game’s first steep roadblocks. I blame the fixed camera for my lack of peripheral reference when it comes to dodgerolling, and shielding their attacks totally depletes all of my stamina. Soulslike bosses are challenging enough, but approaching them in Tunic in the same fashion when one’s sword and shield cannot be upgraded or replaced should be reconsidered. The offerings The Fox makes to increase his stats only do so much. This is why alternating between melee and magic is so important to succeeding with Tunic’s combat, and this especially became the case for the later bosses. The Librarian located at the peak of the Great Library barely gave me any opportunities to strike him with the sword due to him constantly hovering over the perilous arena, and the leaders of the Scavengers kept darting away from my attacks with a great swiftness. Becoming accustomed to dealing out brute force and waves of magic akimbo style proved to be the only permissible method of success with Tunic’s bosses, and this mixed direction that I wasn’t used to in Dark Souls made every win a little more gratifying.

I’ve established that Tunic has substantially emulated so many properties from Dark Souls, but what about the series pension for grim outcomes to resolve an adventure? For as cute as the game is, is it merely an enchanting ruse for the game to make the gut-punch of a finale more visceral? In a way, this is indeed the case. The central lore figure of Tunic’s world is the incorporeal, cerulean fox housed in the central chamber of the overworld’s map. Dividing the tall, golden doors with the first quest and placing the colored keys in the arcane contraption with the second unveil the solid layers to the apparition at the center. The towering blue fox dressed in a satin gown known as The Heir is the game’s final boss, but she is not to be faced immediately. She strikes down our hero with a swipe of her potent blade, and The Fox is reduced to a ghostly form. After this intentional failure, the spirits of the land’s former foxes hang around the grounds as the fox travels to various memorial sights of these former foxes to regain his strength in the increments of the five increasable assets. He can fight The Heir with the reduced stats he has at hand, but only the foolish would dare to do so. In fact, it’s recommended that the player take their time to exhaustively search for every one of the game’s collectables in this purgatorial state because putting in the extra effort will mitigate fighting the final boss. If the player collects every page of the game’s manual, approaching The Heir again will result in her accepting the manual with a similar sense of glee and pride like a child gifting something hand-crafted on Mother’s Day. Completing the manual is still a bafflingly difficult task with having to dissect each of the game’s hidden codes with the “Holy Cross” (the D-pad, if that wasn’t clear). The recitable Konami code, these ain’t. Conversely, coming home empty handed will prompt The Heir to attack with sheer force. This two-phased boss will use rapid sword swipes, energy bursts, and an unhealthy dosage of the glowing, purple corruption matter found in the Quarry to reduce The Fox’s health bar to the size of a fingernail. Tunic doesn’t offer an easy outcome either way, but I still recommend seeking out the pages for the better ending. Curing The Heir is a more interesting ending rather than the recycled Dark Souls resolution of becoming the new martyr in a cyclical process to uphold the new world, which is what happens when The Heir is defeated. Considering how the game looks, I could use something more heartwarming to cap it off.

Transforming Dark Souls into something adorably winsome was the easy aspect of Tunic. Translating all of the properties from the series was the real meat of the matter, and Tunic seems to have processed them efficiently. Still, the extent of which Tunic goes about showcasing these properties gets a tad irksome, especially in regards to obscuring information with a nonsensical language along with the clashing perspective that comes with a fixed camera. Also, as the game progressed, it became evident that Tunic borrowed so much from Dark Souls that the game almost literally became Dark Souls with only a visual discernibility. The classic Zelda influence with its loose exploration limits and item management are the saving graces in Tunic that keep it from being a Dark Souls pastiche, only with a cuddly world instead of a gnarly one. At least Tunic seems to have a profound understanding of what makes Dark Souls effective, so I still left Tunic with the same sense of satisfaction.

The heart and soul of this game is the instruction manual. The learning of controls, navigation, exploration, and eventually, much more, all stem from the in-game manual (which is acquired piecewise throughout the game).

The early adventure plays like a Zelda game but is fresh enough not to feel like a mere knockoff. Acquired items allow the player to more easily navigate the landscape, and multiple divergent paths are typically available to explore. If you're clever or occasionally even just lucky, you'll solve some of the puzzles or venture into hidden areas earlier than expected; if it takes you longer, you'll gradually receive at least a few more hints. While some items must be acquired to traverse the map, just as often, it's not lack of items but lack of knowledge that will be the impediment.

All of that is fun enough and very well done, but the cherry on top is the endgame, which brings hours upon hours of additional puzzle-solving. As a lover of puzzle games like Myst or The Witness, I found this took the game beyond the level of a well-done Zelda replica, to something truly unique. I was fully immersed figuring out how to finish every last task, driven by the game's gradual ramping up of difficulty. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, once you reach the truly mind-bending puzzles you won't even realize how much things have escalated. But they still felt fair. Sure, it took me a while, but I consulted online help guides only once, for a particularly difficult sub-puzzle, one that in hindsight I could have gotten but that probably would have taken me several more hours of pondering.

Of course, this endgame goes well beyond what a Zelda fan might be looking for. And many people who might enjoy these puzzle sequences and open exploration (like someone who enjoyed the Witness) may never even discover this game since it's not on its surface, first and foremost, a puzzle game. In fact, I'm lucky I stumbled upon it, because I picked it up not for the puzzles but for a whimsical Zelda-like adventure with positive reviews (and a create-your-own instruction manual gimmick that luckily turned out to be much more than a gimmick).

And another detriment to would-be-puzzle solvers might be the weakest aspect of the game -- the combat (and movement more generally). It's by no means bad, but it's not nearly as strong as pretty much everything else about this game. Billed as "Souls-like" (I'll admit I don't have firsthand experience of what that means), the combat is challenging, especially in the early game. But although I appreciated the idea behind the combat, I found it clunky through the bitter end, at which point most of the "Souls-like" difficulty has gone out the window because you could kill most basic enemies without blocking, before they could even hit you once. It didn't always feel fair -- and often this unfairness even worked in my favor. E.g., while the bosses are admittedly very well-designed, for a few of them I was able to exploit the fact that they flinch when hit. Thus, if you catch them in a corner, you can continually hit them over and over again, even depleting up to half of their health bar, with no real risk until they slowly manage to work themselves unstuck. Other times though, I found myself up against relatively easy enemies and finding it basically a matter of chance whether my shield would block their attacks. Yes, it's expected to be tricky to master mechanically, but even by the end of the game I wasn't able to really make sense of the blocking game, and pretty much opted to never block and instead just to dodge enemy attacks. And since the first few hours of play are especially challenging (the player is weak and can sustain only a few hits), I'm afraid some players who would otherwise enjoy the other aspects of the game will quit early simply due to this awkwardly difficult combat. Add to that the overall slowness of the player character (even 30 hours in when I realized, far later than most players will, that I could run, this fox is SLOW) and the occasional tendency to get stuck for minutes in tight spots where I feared I would have to return to the title screen to escape (though amazingly I never did), and the movement is easily the one thing that drags this game down for me.

All in all, though, TUNIC is a satisfying puzzle and adventure experience, and I'd highly recommend it for anyone who's still with me at this point.

Few, if any, games ever really capture a childlike spirit of discovery and adventure in the way that Tunic did for me. This endearing and unassuming little indie game may look like a simple Zelda clone but as soon as you scratch the surface you immediately see prominent influences from the souls series as well as a late-game shift towards extensive puzzlers like The Witness or Fez. While Tunic proudly wears influences on its sleeve it exists at the intersection of all these games, which ultimately creates something totally new and deeply absorbing. Twisting nostalgia is at the core here, as evidenced by the Zelda aesthetics and the central hook of collecting pages of an in-game NES-styled manual (written in a cryptic language) that slowly makes sense of the gameplay mechanics and path through the world. The manual allows for fully player-controlled discovery that fuels multiple shout-out-loud “EUREKA” moments as you decipher a mechanic that has been sitting under your nose the whole time, or the purpose of an item you’ve had for ages, or simply where to go next. It all culminates in one of the greatest puzzles in video game history, completely recontextualizing the entire manual you’ve already spent hours pouring over. Tunic never quells its demand that you look a little closer as every inch of the world and manual is littered with secrets and clues that it trusts you to piece together, and once you do you feel like a genius. For the first time ever a game forced me to take out a pen and paper to solve its mystery and I actually wanted to. My jaw was on the floor for the entire second half of this game.

The game was good,, played with partner. Art, lighting, world, music, bosses. All great.

Was however, very challenging, the language confused me and trying to navigate the environment was difficult for my low intelligence.

Great game.

Obtuse, cryptic navigation akin to LOZ1. Terrible combat with forced stamina mechanic, because c'mon, it's 2022, you think you can just roll around without consequences?! Mobile game graphics. In-game map that doesn't highlight or blink your avatar. Awful isometric perspective has the environment constantly obscuring your path, leaving you walking into walls to figure out where you can go. It's like the devs looked at the original Zelda, ignored the next 30+ years of progress in game design and said, "you know, that's not bad, but we need to slap some foxes in here."

Perfect for Souls-babies and old school elitists who feel a sense of superiority by playing the most tortuous and dull games possible. Hard pass for me. Check out Hyper Light Drifter for an actually decent Zelda-like.