Tunic is one of those indie games that I’ve always heard good things about, but that I also heard was quite difficult. Because of that I ignored it for a long time, but this week I decided to give it a shot (it’s on Xbox Game Pass so it was just sitting there, staring at me).

Here’s the elevator pitch. Tunic is a low-poly action-adventure starring a little fox who has to… do… something. It isn’t clear what your goal is. There is some souls-like DNA in the game; you can regain lost health by interacting with a shrine, but doing so respawns all the enemies except for bosses. You collect gold as you fight but if you die you drop it all. You can come back to your corpse to recover it. So that’s the combat challenge. There’s also a bit of rogue-like in there: you pick up items but the only way to figure out what they do is to use them and observe. There’s also a heavy puzzle element to the game. One of the things you collect are pages to the manual for the game which, over time, teach you how to play (presumably). There are also a lot of hidden passages; hidden in an honest way, like behind a stairwell or something. Not hidden in the sense of “There’s a door in front of you but it looks like a solid wall.” At least I didn’t encounter any of the later. Stuff is hidden via perspective instead (you can’t move the camera and you look at the game world from an isometric view).

Tunic seems really well made. It runs like a dream, combat feels fluid, and while the graphics are simple, they are also very pleasing.

But Tunic is not the game for me. It isn’t even the combat so much as the puzzles. I want a good map in games I play. I have a not-great sense of direction and while you do eventually find a 2d map, it isn’t super helpful. I also am not a fan of finding signs and even manual pages written in a language I don’t understand. These are NOT bad game design choices, they’re just not the kinds of things I personally enjoy.

What finally caused me to set it aside was the lack of understandable narrative. My sense is that if you play long enough and find enough of these manual pages you’ll learn why you are fighting all these baddies and what your goal is. But until you do, you’re just playing the game to play the game. At some point in my life I lost the joy in doing that. I need some kind of narrative hook to propel me forward. Fighting games, racing games, PVP shooters… all the genres of games that you play JUST to play and get better at…I’ve kind of lost interest in all of those. Maybe it’s because I’m old and acknowledge I’m never going to be really good at reflex-based games again.

So anyway, Tunic isn’t for me, but I do think it’s a really good game. On Steam it has almost 10K reviews with a “Very Positive” rating and it has an 85% rating on Open Critic. As I write this it is $30 on Steam which feels a little pricey for an indie that came out in 2022, but it’s been down at low as $15 in the past. And as mentioned it is on Game Pass, both PC and Xbox, and has been for a long time so it may be a permanent fixture there. It is also ‘play anywhere’ so you can use the same save file on PC and Xbox.