Tunic

Art by ScruffBucket

I’m just gonna come right out and say it.

Tunic is amazing.

It’s probably the best game I’ve played in the last two years. I had a better time with it than anything that’s come out since 2020.

On the surface, Tunic looks like someone took a Legend of Zelda game and swapped out Link with an adorable little fox. The game begins with you waking up on a beach without any way to defend yourself and a dangerous world ahead full of mysteries to solve and enemies to battle. And while exploration and combat play a big part, there’s so much more to Tunic than it initially lets on.

Now it’s pretty tough to explain what makes Tunic so special without spoiling all of it; this is 100% a game you should experience for yourself. But to give a little context: a major part of the gameplay involves you collecting pages of an in-game instruction booklet (in the old-school NES vein) that are scattered across the world. The pages – as well as most in-game dialogue, signs, etc. - are mostly written in a strange, indecipherable language. As you gather more and more pages, and gather more and more information from them, you slowly start to piece things together. The plot comes into clearer view. Your path forward does as well. But more importantly, so do the game’s mechanics. 

Think of it as an “anti-tutorial”, in that information is deliberately kept from you and drip-fed slowly over time. Whereas most games give you an info-dump whenever you discover a new item or gain a new ability, Tunic makes every new discovery important and meaningful. But the game’s secrets and surprises run much deeper than that. There’s an end-game portion to Tunic that truly caught me off guard and changed how I viewed the game world completely that I wouldn’t dare spoil.

Tunic would be an incredible game to watch speedruns of. Pretty much everything you need to power through the game is available to you from the get-go. Finding out what the various mysteries scattered across the island mean – the golden platforms on the ground, those little hooks you see in high-up places, that dang giant door up at the top of the snowy mountain! – generated some of the greatest “A-HA!” moments I’ve ever had in a game. Once everything starts to click, Tunic is a great big serotonin factory.

I can rave on and on about how much I truly love this game. And while it’s not without its flaws – combat is not as smooth as it should be, and some of the later bosses are near impossible without using the game’s no-fail mode – they weren’t distracting enough to take away from the overall experience.

A sign of a good game for me is when it stays in my head long after credits roll. Whenever I remember a certain part of the game or listen to its amazing soundtrack, I feel happy. It’s pure digital bliss.

And how can you not love that little fox?

A New Gamer Life

 Near the end of 2021, I tweeted this:

I realized as I’ve gotten older my taste in a lot of things has, inevitably, changed a bit. Every so often I would “fall out” of video games for a month or so, having gotten burned out or overwhelmed or in need of a break. However, around the midpoint of 2021 I was feeling a bit disconnected from video games in a way I hadn’t before. Nothing I played, even if I did end up enjoying my time with it, felt like it meant something to me like games in the past had. I couldn’t decide if what I had played just wasn’t that great or if I had finally gotten tired of video games in general. Turns out, it was a mix of both.

So that’s when I decided for myself that I would step away from my desire to play every big-name video game release of the year and go in search of other, smaller games I wouldn’t normally give my attention to. I’ve always loved “indie” games – I’ve always felt they had better design and more inventive ideas than 90% of what big developers dish out on a yearly basis. But each year as I found myself with less and less time on my hands, I had to carefully choose which games I gave my full attention. So, 2022 was going to be the year I veered away from expansive, 60-plus hour gaming adventures and more towards weird, inventive little games with something more interesting to provide. (I did play Horizon Forbidden West to start out the year, and that was the game that, while I thoroughly enjoy it, reminded me why I needed to distance myself from those experiences more)

Every so often I’ll post my thoughts and experiences with these games here. Hopefully I’ll inspire you to try some of them out, too. 

I guess my personal goal with all this is simple: expand my horizons and get out of my comfort zone a bit. Maybe even “grow up” a little, too.

NOTE: I meant to start this project earlier in the year but, you know, LIFE HAPPENED.