Apologies for: long-ass post incoming.
So -
Tunic.
Heads up: there are spoilers here. I won't spoil most of the big surprises, but frankly, if you intend to play Tunic, do not spoil yourself even on the small things, just go and play it first. Okay?
Okay.
On the face of it, Tunic is a Zelda-Dark Souls game. A Zouls-like. You hit stuff with sticks. Then you hit them with a sword. Then you throw bombs at them, and then you
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and then you beat the bosses, and you finish the game. End of story, good game, my previous post in the Gaming Thoughts megathread sums it up.
Except, since I got the game's good ending recently, I've thought more about it. How does a game that looks like this:
take seven years to make? Answer: because it's more than it seems.
At first blush, you're a fox who's dressed like Link, which is clearly a statement of intent. You go through the Zelda motions, find out that the combat has a stamina gauge, and is sort of punishing, and there's shrines that reup your health but also respawn the things that caused you to lose it to begin with. Ugh, Miyazaki-san claims another victim. So anyway, there's still something compelling about this game - it feels sort of, maybe, tactile? There's an enjoyable palpableness to dodge-rolling, to the way a stick glances off a shield, the way sunlight sinks into grass and stone. Clearly, the creators of the game were in love with both craft and craftwork, as evidenced by its angular painted cardboard world and its penchant for diorama.
But even here, you get the feeling there's something more to what you're seeing. Why is everything a foreign language in this place? Why is the in-game manual itself in this foreign language? What am I supposed to even
do? And then you find a manual page that is, thankfully, written at least partially in English; and then you roll your eyes, because you're playing Dark Souls again. Ring this bell, and that one. And then what? Find out!
It's a solution to a self-inflicted problem: what if everyone's hostile and there's no one to guide you? Well, give the player breadcrumbs to find. At this point, though, even if it seems uninspired, you're starting to see where this game's real priorities are - in forcing you to scour the environments and find things to help, it helps you to find a reason to even keep playing, because there's these small things that register off the side of your vision that you might keep in an index of Things that Made Me Go 'Hmm!' in your brain. Doors that won't open, hidden rooms with things you don't understand, dialogue boxes you can't grok, places you know will be reachable at some point, just not this minute.
So far, so Zelda. You ring the bells. And then... well, it's a McGuffin hunt. Your toolset expands, the challenge does too, and you have bosses to fight. You find out how to be better at combat, and upgrade your little fox's abilities. You suss out what the manual's saying in some places which helps you negotiate the challenges better. More odd things in the world show up. Tuning forks? Hooks? When do I get to use them? Meanwhile, the game shows you its tricksy nature by hiding shortcuts in plain sight - or just beyond your sight, behind a wall, or obstructed by a building, say. You take notes, you note landmarks, you note those things that remain unexplained. You now have a map, thankfully, for some of these places at least. And the manual hints at a narrative and some more odd things; there's notations in there? Someone made notes?
You press on, and you finish the bosses, and then... you die. At this point, I feel, most people would give up on Tunic, because the game continues, but it's inordinately punishing because all the upgrades you scoured the world for and fought so hard for are now gone, and you have to fight again at square one. But this is also where you finally get to see what the game's about - using the information you've gained to progress. Because at this point, you're still equipped with the thing the game can't take away from you: knowledge.
And because of this, I've never been so impelled to just figure out a game like this in a good, long while. It teases you with mysteries just out of reach, then looks you in the eye and says, 'Okay, boss. Now what are you going to do about them?'
One of the coolest things about Tunic is that if you started it with the complete manual, and could read its language, you're equipped to end the game in a fraction of the time a full playthrough would have taken. But since you don't know any of that at the start, you have to earn it, and when you do it literally changes how you play the game. Tunic's genius is in knowing that information is its most valuable currency. At the start, you stumble and falter around, threading your way through its innocuous landscape. At the end, you're criss-crossing the place at speed, aware of what almost every feature of it really does, and how you can use it. The game world has reconfigured itself in your mind from simple craftwork cardboard and mowable shrubbery into interconnected layers of meaning and secret pathways. Secrets being hidden in plain sight and how the process of discovering them reframes what you knew about the world: this is the game's strength, and also its biggest weakness.
You see, I've never found a game that's also so in love with making you figure it out, and I've fucking played Riven. The difference is in Riven you usually know something's a puzzle that you need to come back to when you know more. In Tunic, if you want its good ending, you need to go on a scavenger hunt, which involves some observation and cogitation. This is fine, nominally, but some of its puzzles are incredibly arch and the solutions easy to miss. This is complicated by the fact that there's almost always something hidden around the corner, or next to the corner, or sometimes the corner is a misdirection, but sometimes you need to step back and take a look at all the corners, while sometimes the corners need to be lined up so you can solve something else. And then, just maybe, all the corners come together to answer something grander that's only hinted at elsewhere. So the problem is you're bumping into secrets next to secrets at such a pace that it's sort of ridiculous at times. You get the sense that if you asked Tunic's architects to design a castle, they'd lace the thing with hidden passages and fake walls and rooms within rooms until getting yourself a sandwich meant you'd have to travel through the underworld and back out the other side before you got to the kitchen, but then the sandwich was locked under a glass case that you had to dance a three-step jig in front of before it lifted off and allowed you to touch it. It's a bit much, in other words. And
then, after you've finished the game, you can take a stab at translating the rest of its manual from the hints strewn within it (if you want).
This is why it took seven years to make. Starts to make a lot more sense now, doesn't it?
Thankfully, despite all of that, it's more enjoyable an experience than it is frustrating, most of the time. There are some questionable design bits (did you
really need to have enemy attacks that reduced my life bar, Andrew Shouldice?), but in the end I loved my time with it. Most of all, because the empowerment it brings to the player isn't from having shinier armour or a superior sword, but from the sense of having learned things that refract your understanding of how the world works, then using that knowledge to forge your way through it.
In short, Tunic's a great adventure. The world needs more games like it.
And I kinda wonder why. Because, for example, I wasn't a fan of the way Dishonored handled its endings without warning you in advance. Because, I guess, a game needs to have its rules set and communicated in advance. So, perhaps, I'm open to not seeing South of the Circle as a game.
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