Tunic

2025-12-25
The beating heart of Tunic is its digital manual. A kaleidoscope of maps, hints, tips all through the lens of Tunic's beautiful art style. It represents something sadly anachronistic in an age where when I go to pick up a physical copy of a new PS5 game I know that little plastic container is hollow, merely a vessel to transmit disc to disc-drive, bereft of a manual, bereft of paper, bereft of anything else that was once living. Tunic's manual then is doubly vivacious, reviving a dead art form while simultaneously evolving it into something extraordinary by weaving its deepest mysteries within its pages. It's a work of brilliance and a work of love and I couldn't help coming to love it despite bouncing off large portions of the game itself.

The first fly in the ointment is the combat. It starts off fine with its little FromSoftisms of dodge rolls, stamina bars, and shrines that respawn enemies and replenish health potions. But regular battles quickly become rote and bosses like Garden Knight pair boring attack patterns with a gargantuan health bar to make fights a yawn-worthy battle of attrition. Thankfully the game bakes in accessibility options including an invincibility mode which I fucked with heartily so I could toss out the baby and leave the bathwater.

And of course the bathwater du jour is puzzles and exploration. It's sniffing out new pages for your manual which then elevates your understanding of the game which then further unlocks more of the map to find more pages. It's a delightful little flightwheel of game design. And yet even this caused me to grit my teeth with some pacing issues. Multiple times I'd unlock a new ability and excitedly scour the map expecting tons of new opportunities only to find a couple chests of gold. Unlocking a grappling hook ability should be a revelatory addition opening up whole new avenues of the map. Instead I think I think I got maybe two chests of gold, something I never needed more of. And every "new" route made available via the grappling hook was accessible through alternate routes already. This depressing experience happened repeatedly such that there were hours of the game where I was just wandering the map to see what new stuff was unlocked only to find nothing.

Then there's the puzzles themselves which are--and I'll be vague as hell to avoid spoilers--cool! But I just didn't really care about them? The whole True Ending quest at the end is basically one type of puzzle over and over and over. It is admittedly capped off with an incredibly cool meta-puzzle involving the manual but it's just so tedious? Or maybe my experience with the game was so soured by the middling combat and the hiccups in pacing that by the end when they wanted me to pull out a notebook and really invest some time and brain power to crack the code I absolutely could not fucking be asked. Yeah, that's probably it.

Tunic's another one of those games where I'm happy to say it's got some delightful ideas and for a very specific type of person I can see them adoring it. But that person ain't me. I just liked it. I guess.