Tunic
A world has mysteries. It is mysterious. But it is not all mysteries, not one giant interconnected mystery, as Tunic’s land is revealed to be. Yes, sometimes, a burned tree might reveal a secret to everybody. Most of the time, it’ll just turn to ash.
Tunic seems to get that at first. It’s lonely, it’s difficult, everything is written in a foreign script, and you learn by doing. Few games make figuring out how to upgrade your stats feel revelatory, or make upgrading your stats something you have to figure out in the first place. If it must be a Zelda impression, it at least has the good sense to rip off the first.
As you continue, though, the developer’s fingerprints become increasingly stark, and the believable sense of place dissipates.
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Tunic’s main narrative is its metanarrative, which seeks to depict how a player comes to understand a game (literally, in this case) and is mainly conveyed through an NES-style manual for Tunic itself. You collect the manual’s pages over the course of the game. While it’s easy to miss a few, most are left like breadcrumbs along the critical path. And up until the endgame, they usually tell you where to go and what to do next. Do they signpost in bold letters? No. But most of them arrive in a chronological order, and 90 percent of the time, it doesn’t take much thought to see where they’re nudging you. Following mildly cryptic directions is still following directions. The invisible director is always felt hovering overhead, guiding, half-constricting your freedom to truly discover and be lost.
This changes with game’s final puzzles, which you must complete to see the requisite true ending. But some of those are so comically obscure that I doubt most people could ever see them without a guide. There’s a balance problem. It’s nice that these riddles have fostered a helpful player community, and it’s obvious that a ton of work went into crafting them. Sometimes, though, you can work too hard. The very geography of Tunic’s world, along with the seemingly random markings in the faux-manual, are revealed to be deliberately designed clues. There is an “oh, wow” factor to first seeing this, but that quickly gives way to an understanding that everything in this place is thus fake, inorganic, preordained, staged.
This is the case with every video game, to an extent. But Tunic uniquely lionizes its fakeness, mythologizes its openly illusory nature in the pages of its almighty instructions booklet. It is content with the fantasy of a solvable world. It is an eloquently crafted escape room.
What’s left? Visual nods to Link’s Awakening, borrowed bits of Souls games, combat that’s always just a bit off, another “oops, all your shit is gone” section at the end. Those gorgeous songs, sun-kissed shores, murky depths — they give Tunic an ethereal quality, but their pleasures are only aesthetic. The more you play, the further Tunic opens its curtain, and the more its world is revealed to be procedural instead of substantive. Tunic is lovely, but in its obsession with “mystery,” it makes itself impossible to believe in.
5/10
Note: This review was originally published on my blog, Jeff Reviews Games.
