TUNIC — Secret Legend

As a Zelda fan, you've probably heard about TUNIC by now, maybe you've already played it. It's an indie Action Adventure, which is heavily inspired by classic Zelda games and pays tribute to video game manuals of old, which were full of beautiful art and offered valuable pieces of information, just like the one for The Legend of Zelda. But it also mixes in some Souls-like elements to make the combat more challenging.

This game came out in 2022, which was perfect timing due to the delay of Tears of the Kingdom, giving Zelda fans something fresh to play while they had to wait a little longer for the next big title, unless you were very busy with Elden Ring in that year anyway. If you have the Microsoft Game Pass, then you will find the game included in that. And for everyone else still in need, it was on sale for both the Nintendo eShop and Steam a couple of months ago... (Which is were I finally went for it.)

If you ever hated it when certain Zelda games have spelled things out for you, then TUNIC could be your thing, because it literally does the opposite. You're dropped right into the world, not knowing anything about what's going on, and everything is written in a custom-made language, which can't be easily deciphered and is not necessarily meant to be, unless you want to find every last secret on your own. You will get bits and pieces of English, just enough to give you some direction, but not enough to understand the true meaning.

You will have to put this together yourself, where scattered through the world you can find pages of the game's manual. In there you will get many illustrations, some English, some hand-written notes, and other useful things, where some pages even act as your map. But since most of it is still written in the cryptic language and you are also missing pages, you won't be able to understand everything right away. And that's part of the  journey.

Like in most Zelda or Metroid games, there is classic progression based on items. Early on you won't be able to get past by bushes, for example, and you first will need to find a sword for that. That's as classic as it gets. But there is also progression based on knowledge, which means that you won't understand everything right away, like what certain objects in the game world are for. Somewhere down the road, you might get an aha moment by studying the manual pages, which then opens new doors for you – doors that were closed only in your mind. These discoveries are some of the most satisfying moments in the game, and that's the true magic of TUNIC.

This principle is also making the most out of the silent protagonist, a little fox doing a Link cosplay. You don't even know what your task or your role in all of this is. That's something you will have to find out on your way, gradually obtaining more and more context, which may lead to some surprises. And that's something everyone should experience on their own, just like the little fox.

You may get some escape room vibes from all this, where you're given clues and putting it all together, as you collect the different manual pages. It's quite unique for a video game and becomes refreshingly meta. Once you learn more and more, will start seeing hints everywhere in the world, which will lead to even more discoveries. The rabbit hole goes very deep in this one.

In this sense you also have to praise the game's soundtrack, which is psychedelic. The music may not be as memorable overall, save for the beautiful overworld theme, but a lot of effort and thought went into the sound design of TUNIC. This goes as far as that you can run the game's audio through a spectrometer to reveal secrets that are hidden in the spectrograms, like the game's runes. For example, in the shop you will get runes that translate to "buy" or "no". So, not only did they create a whole written language for the game, they made sounds based on it as well.

Other than lots and lots of secrets, the world of TUNIC is also filled with angles for sequence breaking and doing things in any order. If you play it for the first time, it will unfold quite linearly, however. This might be to your liking, because you're getting a helpful sense of direction, but you will get to see the possibilities once you progress, which then may encourage you to experiment in future runs.

The world does have dungeons and you also have some key items to collect to make progress in the story, but it's not necessarily structured like your traditional Zelda game. Some dungeons only act as a passage, while some of the bosses are out in the overworld. So, the world design is technically closer to a Metroid game than a Zelda game.

You will even find checkpoints, where you will respawn upon death. You will then leave an echo behind together with some gems, the game's currency, but only a few and not your total amount, unlike Hollow Knight for example. So, you don't really have to go for it, where picking your echo up mainly serves as a help, because doing so will create a small shockwave stunning nearby enemies.

The checkpoints will also refill all of your potions and meters: health, stamina and magic. They are represented in the colors red, green and blue, which is common theme throughout the game. Stamina is the only of these bars that also refills automatically, and is used for both blocking and rolling. Health can be regained via the potions, which are collected in a similar fashion to the Pieces of Hearts and Heart Containers from the Zelda series. They also have to be used in real time, so healing can be interrupted by enemies. Finally, magic is used for certain items, like the Wand (a fire rod), and can be refilled either from enemy drops or blue fruits.

The fruits are part of the game's various depletable items, which also include different types of bombs. Those are not saved on checkpoints, meaning that they are gone once you use them, even if you die, and then you need to buy (or find) new ones. This is one of the few design flaws in TUNIC, because it can lead to unwanted grinding in case you need some of these items for tougher battles. And some of the stronger ones can't even be re-purchased, so they will be gone for good and can effectively be wasted.

There is a system in the game where you get some free extra bombs, which are then replenished with the checkpoints. And it might have been better if most of the game's items worked like that...

Like with using potions, the game will keep running when you go into your inventory, meaning that you can't easily swap items in the middle of a battle and therefore have to be quite conscious about what you put on your buttons (where you can freely use X, Y, and B).

The same goes for the cards. These essentially work like the Charms from Hollow Knight, so you can equip a limited number of them for different buffs and effects. However, the game doesn't really tell you about those, and only a few are revealed by the manual. And it's not always obvious what the cards do on first glance, some even come with negative effects and you have to be careful... So, collecting them doesn't feel all too satisfying and useful at first.

As for your stats, you have three different bars with your total amount of HP, SP and MP, but also three other attributes: attack, defense, and the potency of your potions. They can be improved in the game via some other collectibles, but you will also need a lot of gems, so there is always a good reason to keep fighting enemies.

However, there is one point in the game which will take away all these stats and then make you go fight the most difficult enemy gauntlets yet, which feels totally unfair. Here you will have to make the cheese and eat it, too, but this can lead to a situation where you're stuck with grinding the same things before the fight, because you may need them.

And your quest to regain all your stats drags on quite a bit afterwards... Overcoming all this will make you feel like a true hero, but it's also the game's low point for sure and might be quite demotivating for some people.

The combat can also be a bit clunky. It lacks impact, the dodge roll is a bit slow, and the timing for the parrying is also hard to master, but luckily you don't really need the latter at any point in the game, though it can be advantageous. It's not that fighting in TUNIC is terrible – it's certainly not worse than your usual top-down Zelda game and does offer some good challenge. But it's also not in the same league as Hollow Knight or Death's Door, where it's a big part of what makes playing these Action Adventures so insanely satisfying and addicting. TUNIC encourages cheesing more than anything else, meaning that it's often not about skill, but about being clever. And that can make it feel a bit cheap.

You will get some spectacular boss fights nevertheless, often well staged. The Siege Engine, for example, which is a gigantic war machine, will leave a permanent impression. And yes, similar to Breath of the Wild, technology does play an important role in this fantasy world, though it is seamlessly integrated and therefore never feels out of place.

Doing absolutely everything in TUNIC will take quite some dedication and roughly 30 hours, maybe less if you're super smart or willing to look up solutions on the internet. But if you're simply gunning for the final boss, then it will take less than half of that. It's a rather short game overall, where most of the play time will come from figuring out all of its secrets. Which are a lot.

If you're still looking for more, there is also a New Game+, where you keep all your stats and even all of your items, with a few key exceptions. This completely opens the game up, where you can do almost everything in any order. Well, technically you could before, but it's much easier in this mode. The battles are also easier for the most part, but you will occasionally find stronger foes to make things more interesting than before.

Otherwise there isn't really much to it, however. Once you've beaten and potentially even completed TUNIC, all the mystery will be gone and with that a lot of the game's appeal. This is one of those games where you wish that you could delete your memories about it and experience it for the first time again.

Conclusion

With TUNIC you will get a love letter to video games of old, where looking at a beautiful manual was part of the experience and where you never really knew what secrets are hidden within the games that you have. If you go in blind, then this will be a game that can surprise you in many ways. It does have some rough edges, though, where the combat could be more fun and its item system could be simplified a bit, but overall this game can be recommended to any Zelda fan out there.

PS: I will also talk about my personal journey through the game and my struggles in a separate post.