---
title: Tunic
type: Game
date: 2022-10-18
rating: 9
genre:
  - Experimental
year: 2022
status: Finished
image: tunic.jpg
tags:
  - game
colorSortKey: [0, 125, 7]
---
 You should play Tunic. Let me lead off with that: it is a beautiful game, rich in texture and metis, filled with joy and detail and surprises that rank up there with [[celeste]] and Breath of the Wild in terms of moments that bring me back to the child-like wonder of exploring a new and dangerous world.

If I were to describe _what Tunic_ is, I would probably first try to phrase it as a cocktail:

1. The aesthetic and visual attention of Monument Valley, 2. The world & exploration of, say, [[Link to the Past]], 3. The puzzles & metagaming of Fez.

All of those reference points work, but I don't think they quite add up to the sheer _gestalt_ that makes Tunic work. MY second description would be a bit pithier:

> Playing Tunic is like playing a copy of an old Zelda game from an alternate universe.

The core conceit of the game's progression — the _instruction manual that you need to proceed being scattered around the game workd_ — is so obvious of a love letter to SNES-era gaming I can't help but admire it. There are a couple Metroidvania-esque unlocks in the game, but the majority of the things you "unlock" are understanding — you will go fifteen of the game's twenty hours without knowing what a certain button does even though it's available to you from the starting screen, for instance. You in many ways master _Tunic_ by literally (because it has its own invented language!) and figuratively learning the game's language.

I had one big problem with this game: its combat. It does not feel particularly good. It's not _punishing-but-rewarding_ (like, say, [[hades]] or [[celeste]]) nor _punishing-but-thats-the-point_. It's punishing but in unintentional and slightly dream-like ways: I felt like the combat was an annoying obstacle whose physics never quite made sense to me.

This is all blessedly ameliorated by the presence of difficulty modifiers. There's a "make combat easier" button that I toggled on at around halfway through the game without a second thought — it didn't _trivialize_ everything, but it made the harder gauntlets of the game a little more bearable. (Every game should have one of these, and I felt the same way about the inclusion of it in [[crosscode]] — sure, there's a tiny bit of shame, but at this point I'm less interested in video games as Herculean challenges.) But the _gulf_ between the exploration and the combat modes of Tunic felt like the closest objective mark I could make against it: the very best games are the ones where every single part of the package is part of the same strong design, and I don't quite think Tunic hit that mark.

Still: as I write this, it's my favorite game of the year and it was an absolute blast to play through. You should play it, too — with two caveats:

1. Read nothing about the game (it's more fun that way, for reasons that will quickly become clear) 2. Don't be afraid to turn down the difficulty