A LINK TO THE FOX
Also for: Macintosh, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Windows, Windows
Apps, Xbox One, Xbox Series
It stars a cute fox! It's just like 2D Zelda! It contains an
interactive manual that you unlock page-by-page by exploring the game
world! With features like that, Tunic seems destined to become a cult classic
sensation. And what is there not to like about a pretty, charming and deceptively
difficult adventure such as this? It just radiates hard Nintendo nostalgia. You'll get stuck for
hours, scour the manual back and forth for clues and rack your brain trying to
remember where you saw a particular detail in the environment that has
suddenly become relevant. And when you finally crack the code, it's with a great sense
of pride and accomplishment.
Tunic is also deeply enigmatic, as it doesn't feature a fully comprehensible
narrative. Instead the story is hidden behind glyphs that it seems you could
decode if you wanted to. But the game does nothing of the sort for you - you
have to make the effort yourself, only to ultimately fail because the markings
don't correspond to any specific real-world alphabet.
The manual, which emulates a physical one complete with coffee stains and pen
markings, provides a few loose words or short phrases in English. The rest is
written in the same unknown, archaic language that vaguely resembles oriental
text. And still, that manual is central to the experience, so much so that if
you ignore it, you'll get nowhere. It should, perhaps, rather be called a hint
book - one you can't quite comprehend.
I guess Tunic simulates the sensation of being a young kid playing a tricky
action adventure at an age where you're just starting to read, or learning a
foreign language for that matter. Just look at the way the game screen fades
into a simulated CRT screen in the background when you open up the manual. For
me, the sensation is closest to memories of playing obscure English text
adventures on our ZX Spectrum long before I was ready. As a six-
or seven-year old Swedish boy I hardly knew any English, so I frequently
checked a dictionary with the monochrome screen radiating in the background.
Tunic is so neatly designed that, even when you're stuck for hours, you'll
often enough make some sort of progress. New areas might open up in old
environments, and although you're not advancing the main quest a newly
acquired skill might suddenly allow you to reach a treasure chest, loaded with
riches, that you couldn't get to before. Or you might find an item that could
help you defeat a boss you're stuck on.
In short: this is a game for hardcore gamers, made by a seasoned gamer. It
started out as a one-man project. Developer Andrew Shouldice began work on the game on his own in 2015, later enlisting aid in sound
design and composing, and then expanded the team into a proper, small studio
called Isometricorp Games. With a debut this promising, this
studio will be one to follow in years to come.
Tunic starts out with you, an antropomorphic little fox awakening on a beach in a pristine natural setting, viewed from an isometric perspective. You
don't yet have a main quest or a clear sense of where to go, but the game
design guarantees that you soon find the brief tutorial, which means picking
up your first weapon and assigning it to your attack button of choice. And
wouldn't you know it, here comes your first enemy encounter, as easy as
initial encounters go, to teach you about the art of self-defense.
It's an intriguing, textbook start. The game instantly hooks you with its smooth, colorful visuals and playful soundtrack, just like
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It also has responsive and
intuitive controls that allows you to assign your favorite items to the controller's face buttons. The initially simple control scheme also hides some really
important functions you'll learn by collecting and reading the manual. It's a
revelation to realize that some crucial abilites were available to you right
from the get-go. Only a lack of good instructions kept you from utilizing
them.
The further along you go, the more of the story and the world you piece
together. After finding the sword, the shield and a few item pickups you're
ready for a great, big adventure exploring the wilderness and dungeons,
warping back and forth between fast travel markers, purchasing new upgrades
and leveling up a few character attributes. After slaying a few easy
opponents, you run into harder, armor-clad dudes that'll most likely cause a
bit of trouble.
The enemy design and variation is great. I appreciate that they inhabit places
where it makes sense they'd feel at home. The way they interact with their
environments heightens the sensation of exploring a lived-in place with a strong sense of history behind it. Your
different means to tackle combat encounters are adequate. A couple of magic wands and other
weapons expand your combat vernicular to include ranged attacks. They all
consume mana, but are more or less essential against some of the nimble or
flying opponents.
And as you keep exploring the land, the cuteness starts giving way to more and
more sinister landscapes and ominous plot developments. A big fox, seemingly
trapped behind a force field, seems to be part of the main quest, but
releasing it is no straightforward task. The game world gradually grows
darker, less organic and more toxic. In the tradition of Dark Souls,
Tunic successfully utilizes the environment and oppressive audio design to
tell the story of its world rather than its protagonist, treating the fox as a
mere vessel for the player, whose task it is to set things straight.
Page by page, the manual fills you in on what to do and what area to explore
to make progress. New manual pages foreshadow upcoming puzzles, enemies and
areas as you start dreading what's ahead. It helps you to know what to look
out for. Enemies litter the screen in most locations, and the standard monster
is not too hard to take out with a couple of swings once you learn their
simple attack patterns. But when they gank up on you the difficulty mounts.
Just like Zelda, the further you advance through the game, the more ridiculous
it gets. A few humbling bosses cross your path to make sure you
made your homework. Bloodborne was apparently a major influence in
combat, and Tunic adopts the same stamina-managment ebb and flow of attacking
windows, followed by a quick withdrawal to defend. Upon death, all enemies
return and you respawn at the nearest checkpoint, which might take you back
quite a distance.
The difficulty spikes are, in my opinion, where the game falters. I found the
defensive maneuvers - dodgeroll, shield block, parry, counterattack - too
haphazard and unreliable. They work often enough, but all of a sudden they
don't for no apparent reason, and against bosses the punishment
means losing a large chunk of health. You have a limited amount of health
flasks and some magic attacks to keep the creature at bay, but very few
opportunities to safely use them without getting struck again.
And as you reach the final section of the game, you're presented with two
different ways to beat the game. Here is where the Zelda inspiration throws
the experience down a rabbit hole of anguish. Both of the endings are insanely
tough to crack, each in its own unique way. The "good", pacifist one requires
a great deal of luck, clever thinking, exploration and deciphering. The
"dark", confrontational one requires superhuman skill and a great deal of
min-maxing and tweaking against an unfairly tough, two-staged enemy boss. I
could crack neither without online hints. And even then, I struggled a fair
bit to execute either.
I'm not one to scoff at a tough challenge. I actually cracked the method to
solve the good ending by myself, but executing the dang solution to the puzzle was so hard
that I gave up. My controller was too imprecise, and the clues/instructions in
the manual were too hard to decipher. When I compared my notes to the correct
ones it turned out I had misenterpreted one or two input commands in a long
line of commands, which rendered my solution completely worthless.
So I gave up and decided to give the dark ending a shot, but the final boss was
about the toughest opponent I've ever fought - especially in its dreaded
second phase. I gave it maybe 40-50 attempts, without ever
getting particularly close to succeeding. For me, in terms of difficulty,
Tunic's final boss ranks alongside the Nameless King - the toughest optional
boss in Dark Souls III - as the hardest one I've ever fought in any game, and I
never did beat the Nameless King.
I gave up and checked online for solutions, or tips and tricks, to reach any of the endings. Nothing can be more disheartening than getting close to the end of a game and
realize you might not have the chops to pull through. The puzzle to reach the
good ending is even harder to crack than beating the final boss. Even when I
had the correct solution at hand, I failed repeatedly to execute it because of
the Switch Pro Controller's innate faults. I can't spoil exactly what I mean
without giving away too much, but I had to switch to my 8BitDo-controller to
make it work, and it still took me a few attempts.
For me, just like The Adventures of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Tunic starts to
deteriorate close to the end, leaving me with a bitter aftertaste. After an
excellent start and an amazing middle part, the game comes to a screeching
halt and I stop having fun. It becomes way too stuck up its inspirational
arse, and its high but fair difficulty turns into a bad, unfair one - at least
for me. I watched the ending unfurl with no sense of accomplishment, and
consequently felt no emotional attachment to the "good" story outcome. This
was not my ending, because I hadn't earned it.
I realize part of the blame falls on me and my inadequacies. And aesthetically, Tunic is a marvel. Narratively, the journey from brightness into despair
never sets one foot wrong. It has some strong twists in store. In terms of gameplay I admire the game for all that
led up to the last sections - the mounting challenge, world design and the
corresponding puzzles and combat - but I'd be dishonest to say it held
together all the way through to a strong ending.
It's such a shame. I could do nothing inside the game to make it easier or
better, I was already fully leveled up, and could only prevail by butting
heads and hope to improve. But it didn't seem to happen. The game just had too much
fun yanking the prize from under my nose, and that's one devastating thing
I'll always hate about Tunic.
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