Loading…Review of Tunic

I’m inaugurating a new series on the blog with this post because I finally have gotten up the courage to come out as a gamer. I didn’t think of myself as a gamer until recently for a couple reasons: 1. Up until the Pandemic, I was pretty sporadic, and I usually just played little games on my iPhone while waiting in line, etc. 2. Identifying as a “gamer” had certain, shall we say, basement-y connotations, particularly after Gamergate. But then I realized, especially after Gamergate, how many awesome women gamers there are, and I also realized looking back on it that there hasn’t ever been a epoch in my life in which I haven’t been playing at least one computer game or video game: starting with Zork and Star Trek on my dad’s 8088, then Popeye and the other games on our ColecoVision console, then Lemmings, Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Myst…. Yeah, it’s probably high time to fess up.

Now, having said all that, I’m not a serious gamer: my hand-eye coordination and reaction time are mediocre at best, and I game as a distraction, not to achieve something. Thus, a game needs to be engaging to keep my attention. I’ve struggled to find games that hit that sweet spot I’m looking for, right in the intersection of a motivating story, beautiful design, challenging game play, and joy. Games that are pretty and uplifting are too often boring to play (yawn, Animal Crossing). Games that have a deep story are frequently so dark and depressing I don’t feel like spending hours of my free time trapped in that world (e.g., Shadow of the Colossus). The Legend of Zelda games generally hit that sweet spot for me, and now I’ve found another that I love just as much if not more.

I really can’t say too much about Tunic without spoiling it for those of you who might want to play it because it’s rife with secrets. I can tell you what designer Andrew Shouldice says about it, which is that it’s a game about “a tiny fox in a big world where you don’t belong.” You wake up as that fox on the sundrenched shores of an isometric world with zero clue about where to go or what to do. There’s not even a manual—okay, there is, but you pick it up a page at a time as you explore, and it’s mostly written in a secret fox language you can’t read anyway unless you put the time into translating it, which I did not, or cheat and look up the translation on the Internet, which I didn’t need to because it turns out you don’t need to be able to read the manual, or the signs scattered about the landscape, to play the game. (Shouldice said he was trying to replicate his experience of being a little kid and picking up rental games that either didn’t have manuals or had ones that weren’t translated or that used words he didn’t know yet.)

In spite of how foreign everything in the world felt, it quickly became clear at least what the first steps of the quest were, and I was intrigued enough, and beguiled enough by the beautiful world, to want to press on. The ruins all around, and the pages of the manual I collected, indicated that something terrible had happened to this world and this little fox, and I wanted to solve that mystery. The fact that most of the cute creatures I encountered were trying to kill me for some unexplained reason (and succeeded with regularity) only added to that sense of urgency.

The combat in Tunic is *hard* at least for someone with my skill set. I quickly discovered that my habitual, lazy Zelda-like spamming just resulted in being resurrected over and over again at one of the fox shrines scattered liberally around the landscape. I had to actually study bosses and learn their patterns, and actually learn to operate the combat mechanics, to survive and progress in the game. But I did, and that sense of accomplishment was surprisingly motivating. If the combat ever gets too hard or discouraging, you can turn on an “Invincible” mode, but every time I contemplated pushing that button, I always managed to pull out a victory if I gave it one or two more runs; for me, that’s a perfect level of difficulty. I feel like I’m better at gaming after finishing Tunic, and that feels good, too.

Interestingly, the soundtrack actually helped here. It’s soothing and atmospheric and noticeably added to my enjoyment in gameplay even in stressful sequences—unlike some soundtracks that stress me out so much I have to turn them off. Without giving too much away, I’ll also say that it behooves the player to pay attention to the audio; the sound design, like everything else in the game, has been very carefully thought through.

Shouldice has a background designing puzzle games, and that’s what Tunic is at its core. There are puzzles *everywhere* in the game, but they’re not random flexes—their solutions help solve the mystery of what happened to the world and what the little fox’s role in all of it was and is. They’re sometimes easy, sometimes challenging, and occasionally so hard that I had to give up and look them up on the Internet after breaking my head against them for a couple of hours. But they were always fun to work on; at one point I had post-it notes pasted all over my kitchen counter…. Not only does the Zelda-like habit of poking around in every dark corner pay off in spades in Tunic, many of its secrets are hiding in plain sight, revealed by keys or perspectives acquired later in the game. Apparently there are still secrets hiding in the game a year or so onward that haven’t been unlocked; there are whole Reddit forums and Discords devoted to sleuthing these out using some pretty sophisticated methods.

I suppose all of this might sound pretty standard for a good adventure game, but what wasn’t standard—at least in my experience—was the ethos of Tunic. It has a heart. If you decide to play it, you will probably really start to care about this little fox and what happens to them, and what happened to their world. And if you stick with it to the end, the game will leave you with a lot to reflect on in terms of your own relationships and how we treat each other in our society. If you do end up deciding to play, say hi to the Shopkeeper for me (pictured above). They’re my absolute favorite character. They look scary, sure, but as with so many things in Tunic, first impressions turn out to be deceiving.