A LINK TO THE FOX
It stars a cute fox. It looks like 2D Zelda. It features an interactive manual you unlock page by page as you explore the world. With a pitch like that, Tunic feels destined to become a cult classic. And at first, it absolutely earns that promise.
Everything about the game radiates hard Nintendo nostalgia. You’ll get stuck for hours, pore over the manual back and forth for clues, and rack your brain trying to remember where you once saw a detail in the environment that has suddenly become relevant. And when you finally crack a puzzle, the sense of pride and accomplishment is immense.
Tunic is also deeply enigmatic. Its story is not presented in a conventional way, but hidden behind glyphs that seem decipherable—until you realize they correspond to no real-world alphabet. The game never helps you translate them. You’re invited to try, encouraged to care, and then left to fail.
The in-game manual is central to this experience. It mimics a physical booklet, complete with coffee stains and scribbled notes. A few scattered words or short phrases are written in English, but the rest appears in the same cryptic, archaic script. And yet, without consulting this manual constantly, you will make no progress at all. It’s less a manual than a hint book you can never fully understand.
In a strange way, Tunic recreates the feeling of being a child playing a complex action-adventure before you’re quite ready for it. When you open the manual, the game screen fades into the background behind a simulated CRT filter. For me, it evokes memories of playing obscure English text adventures on a ZX Spectrum long before I understood the language. As a six- or seven-year-old Swedish kid, I played with a dictionary beside me, the glow of the screen filling the room.
Despite its opacity, Tunic is meticulously designed. Even when you’re stuck, you’ll usually make some kind of progress. New paths open in familiar areas. A newly acquired skill might allow you to reach a previously inaccessible treasure chest, or give you the edge you need against a stubborn boss. It’s a game that constantly nudges you forward without ever clearly explaining how.
This is, in short, a game for hardcore players, made by a seasoned one. It began as a solo project by Andrew Shouldice in 2015, later expanding into a small studio effort under the name Isometricorp Games. Judging by this debut alone, it’s a studio worth following.
The game opens with your anthropomorphic fox awakening on a beach, viewed from an isometric perspective. There’s no clear objective, but the design subtly funnels you toward a brief tutorial—picking up your first weapon, assigning it to a button, and engaging in a simple enemy encounter. It’s textbook stuff, and it works beautifully.
Visually and tonally, the opening hours are immediately inviting. The colorful art style and playful soundtrack recall The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, while the controls are responsive and intuitive. Items can be mapped to face buttons, and the initially simple control scheme hides crucial mechanics you’ll only discover later through the manual. Realizing that essential abilities were available to you from the very start—hidden only by a lack of instruction—is a genuine revelation.
As you venture deeper, the world and its story gradually come into focus. After acquiring a sword, a shield, and a handful of upgrades, you’re free to explore wilderness areas and dungeons, warp between fast-travel points, purchase upgrades, and improve your character. Enemy variety is strong, and creatures feel naturally placed within their environments. Combat options expand with magic wands and ranged attacks, all consuming mana and becoming essential against flying or nimble foes.
Over time, the game’s cheerful exterior gives way to darker, more oppressive environments. A large fox trapped behind a force field hints at the central mystery, while the world itself grows increasingly hostile and corrupted. Like Dark Souls, Tunic relies heavily on environmental storytelling, treating the protagonist as a vessel rather than a character, and letting atmosphere do the narrative heavy lifting.
Page by page, the manual foreshadows upcoming challenges, enemies, and locations, often making you dread what lies ahead. Basic enemies are manageable once you learn their attack patterns, but they quickly become dangerous in groups.
And then there’s the difficulty.
Tunic clearly draws inspiration from Bloodborne, adopting a stamina-based rhythm of aggression and retreat. Upon death, all enemies respawn and you’re returned to the nearest checkpoint, which can mean a long trek back to where you fell. Unfortunately, this is where the experience starts to fray.
I found the defensive mechanics—dodging, blocking, parrying, counterattacking—unreliable. They work often enough to feel intentional, but fail often enough to feel arbitrary. Against bosses, a single mistake can cost a massive chunk of health, and opportunities to safely heal are few and far between.
The game’s final stretch presents two possible endings. Both are punishing in different ways. The “good” ending is a pacifist route that demands meticulous exploration, sharp observation, and extensive deciphering. The “dark” ending hinges on raw mechanical skill, culminating in an absurdly difficult two-phase boss fight. I couldn’t complete either without outside help.
I actually figured out the solution to the good ending on my own—but executing it proved too demanding. A single misinterpreted input in a long command sequence invalidated the entire solution. Even after consulting a guide, I struggled to perform it reliably, partly due to controller imprecision.
I eventually turned to the dark ending instead, only to face what may be the hardest boss I’ve ever encountered. After forty or fifty attempts, I gave up. For context: this boss ranks alongside the Nameless King from Dark Souls III for me—and I never beat him either.
Nothing is more disheartening than reaching the end of a game and realizing you simply don’t have the tools to finish it. When difficulty shifts from demanding to exclusionary, something fundamental breaks. Watching the ending unfold without having truly earned it left me emotionally detached. This wasn’t my ending.
Like A Link to the Past, Tunic falters near the finish line. Its opening hours are excellent, its middle stretch inspired—but the final act collapses under the weight of its own cleverness. The fair challenge hardens into something punitive and unyielding.
Aesthetically, Tunic is a marvel. Narratively, its descent from light into despair is expertly handled. Mechanically and structurally, much of it is brilliant. But I can’t honestly say it holds together all the way through.
That’s the tragedy of Tunic. I did everything the game asked of me. I was fully upgraded. The only path forward was brute persistence, hoping improvement would come. It never did.
The game seemed to take pleasure in pulling the reward away at the last possible moment—and that’s something I’ll always resent.
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