Tunic – Zero Punctuation

So no I’m not doing Kirby today. If only there was something that combined the nostalgic vibes of a first party Nintendo game with an original IP and being generally meatier than a petrol station sausage roll. Well, happily, there is, it’s called Tunic, it came out in March, and I’ve finally finished it now all those triple-A birdwatching simulators are done selfishly hogging my afternoons. But indie games don’t get a free ride from me just for not being triple-A, a kick in the kneecap doesn’t not hurt just because it’s not a rake to the goolies. And indie has the same issue with triple-A in that there’s two or three genres of gameplay that are massively overrepresented and get all the coverage. Roguelikes, retro style hack and slashers with soulslike elements, or roguelike retro style hack and slashers with etc. Tunic, for the record, being of the second lot. You play an adorable little fox boy with a sword who has to rescue his adorable isometric world by fixing all the machinery in all the ruined yet surprisingly functional ancient temples and kill a lot of blob monsters and skeletons like a combination pest controller ancient magical bullshit support technician.

So far, pretty standard. It’s even got that smoothly textured visual style things like Death’s Door and the Link’s Awakening remake have that makes everything look like cat toys strewn across the top of a wedding cake, complete with a tilt shift focus to complete the effect of looking like we just marched fully-formed out of a Happy meal box. But while Tunic isn’t doing a lot new at first glance it does a lot of things right. I know, because a few hours in it gave me that now sadly rare little jolt of realization where I go “I’m kind of into this.” There’s another dimension underlying Tunic’s simple surface. Part of it’s that one of the central mechanics is collecting all the pages for what looks very convincingly like a retro-style manual for the game we’re currently playing, printed largely in an incomprehensible made-up language. It puts a new light on the usual retro game nostalgia, recreating the feeling of coming home with a new game you got at the car boot sale only to find it’s the original Japanese version but you were determined to make the best of it because you’d already blown all the money you got from cleaning hardened toothpaste stains off of Mrs. Boothroyd’s cat so you did your best to figure things out from the imagery in the manual alone.

And doing so lent the game an additional layer of arcane mystery that would’ve been lost if you’d been able to read the thing that says that Billy the Blob Monster is very cross at you for no reason and you’d better watch out for when his big brother shows up. That’s the 100% universal childhood experience that Tunic evokes. It pulls off that air of a deeper mystery, one that’s fully entwined with the game mechanics as certain things like upgrading your character and activating statues require a slightly esoteric process that has to be deciphered from the pages of the manual, and the isometric perspective frequently and deliberately conceals paths within the level geometry. The manual does contain maps, some more abstract than others, but it’s not always obvious which one you’re currently on, so figuring out basic things like where you are and where you’re going requires just that little bit of extra effort to make it interesting and it drew me in a lot better than just making beelines for the objective markers like a toddler who’s just noticed an uncovered electrical socket. It’s a nice feeling. Hey, look at me, I found a hidden chest behind a wall because I figured out what a symbol meant on a map. Give me a frozen beard and several doomed mates and I’m basically Robert Falcon Scott.

But importantly, the way forward is never so obscure as to leave you stuck for too long, which reflects good design and pacing. No, it’s the major boss fights that’ll get you stuck, if anything. Ho yes, welcome back to Earth, Captain Scott, let’s see how those mapreading skills help you against this giant possessed nest of tables. Combat’s got that Zelda feel where your basic attack looks like your character is just holding out the sword and then very aggressively spinning like a Mickey Mouse watch going haywire, but if you take the approach of standing there mashing attack like the business end of an automated kitchen appliance then you’ll swiftly learn a harsh lesson in proper food preparation. That, plus the sense of unease one gets from the way the world seems to be falling apart at the seams as we get nearer the end, fuels the realization “Hey, this isn’t a Zeldalike at all, it’s a Soulslike. Our green-suited Beanie Baby protagonist is barrelling towards one of those depressing Soulslike endings where we’re left alone to hold off the darkness at the edge of the world for eternity or something rather than the grateful rescued princess and implied offscreen royal hand shandy.”

So if I were to get a whine going, the individual grapes I’d use would be the slightly off-putting difficulty spike the boss fights represent. As I’m forced to battle a giant crab robot essentially by getting within workplace sexual harassment charges range of his dangling metallic testicles I wonder if some of these battles weren’t designed for a protagonist with a longer weapon, one that perhaps couldn’t do an equally efficient job by belly dancing fast enough to thwack the enemy with their nipple piercings. I’m also not a huge fan of the inventory menu and the way it doesn’t pause the game. There really is no excuse for that in an offline experience. I’ve got all these funky consumables that I can’t bloody use because there’s only three equip slots and if I go into the menu to switch one of them in I’m going to get pounded like a recurring pop-up ad’s cancel button and then get confused and flustered and reassign all my equipment trying to find the menu close button and end up slinging individual lemon curd tartlets at the boss instead of bombs. But those are petty nits to pick, and at the end of the day I’d definitely recommend a look at Tunic; probably the best game since Sacred Armour of Antirad to be named after the complete text of the main character’s laundry list.