We love The Legend of Zelda and modern variations on the theme. And if you add an adorable little fox, a mysterious atmosphere, lots of secrets and soulslide elements, you get… You get Tunic, one of the best indie games of recent times.
Guide to Action
The main thing that immediately appeals to Tunic is not the bright pictures and nice music (even though they set the mood right away), but the atmosphere of mystery. Initially it is not clear who we are, what to do, where to go and why. A nameless, silent fox finds himself on a strange island full of temples, staircases, pyramids, mysterious obelisks and statues. In one of the temples, at the very beginning, we see a large fox, which looks more like a ghost and seems to be locked in a cage. After the hero’s first death, it is she who resurrects him. Is this his mother, and does the fox need to save her?
Many of the answers (but not all) we find in the pages of the manual, around the collection of which is built almost the entire game. From them, we learn, in particular, that the fox must find a hidden treasure in distant lands, with which “you can defeat death itself. In any case, you have to search for artifacts all the way, put them in the right place and activate something, doing it in the most different locations – here and meadows, and snow-covered mountains, and dark dungeons, and some industrial interiors.
And we’ll see hints on where to look, where to put it and how to activate it in general, again, in the manual pages. There are obvious things – if you found a lantern, you can now normally explore very dark dungeons. If you’ve found a sword, then they need to cut down the bushes that were blocking the way to some places. But, for example, only from the manual you learn that the button on the gamepad for rolling, if you press it for three seconds, you can activate the mysterious obelisks – it is necessary to advance in the story. And I, like an idiot, spent five minutes jumping around them, looking sad and clicking everything, not understanding what the game wants me to do.
This is what the main puzzles in Tunic are all about – finding answers on how to get further. And the stylishly designed manual pages in this sense are themselves a key part of the mechanics. Or you have to do it by trial and error. On the one hand, it’s a clear reference to the old games, where you often couldn’t figure out what to do and what’s going on without carefully studying the tutorial. On the other hand, the authors of Tunic did it in their own stylish way.
So what does this have to do with soulslide? Most of the time we fight, actively using dodge/roll/block (if you find a shield), which chews up stamina. You can save yourself on special altars – rest rest restores health, “stamina”, mana and healing potions, but, as it should, also resurrects enemies. And after the death to run to the place of death to pick up his ghost lost gold, which we not only knock out the enemies, but also get out of the many chests.
The enemies, even the privates, are pretty strong. Not to mention the bosses – they are all different and interesting, with unique mechanics, which do not always consist of summoning minions. And the first boss can let you down from the colorful Zelda-journey to the Souls-action. You have to learn the timings and tactics of the creeps time after time.
If you activate your own ghost to get the gold back, it will damage your enemies.
Those who want just riddles and adventures and can not stand soulslayer, it can bend – especially since there are no difficulty levels. But if they poke around in the settings, they’ll find that you can turn on immortality mode and remove the dependence on stamina – it’s certainly not fair, but it will pass the most difficult moments and continue to enjoy the exciting adventure.
And you can also stab in the back and throw bombs.
So again, this is a moment of learning the mechanics – we have to find, read and understand it ourselves. And so in everything. It was from the pages of the manual we learn that not only can be healed and saved on the altars, but also to pump – for this you need to sacrifice a certain item and pay a certain amount. That’s just which of them and which parameter improves, what in principle there is a characteristic, at first it is unknown – to help are the following pages of the guide and the method of gut feeling.
In the same way we learn the purpose of runes, which, if equipped in the inventory, give bonuses, and supplies – among them there are bombs, lures, and much more. And found/bought for the price of rare coins can be thrown into the wells, receiving as a reward items for performance boosting. And all of this, I repeat, is not perceived as a shortcoming or inconvenience, but as a feature of a game that wants us to constantly learn and learn something.
Pros: gameplay at the intersection of “Zelda” and Souls; level design; secrets; variety of enemies and bosses; interesting system of learning game mechanics through searching manual pages; intriguing story; atmospheric audio-visual performance.
Cons: control and camera problems.