My Journey Through TUNIC

After my review, l wanted to talk a bit about my personal experience with TUNIC. Where did I get stuck? How far did I go with finding out all its secrets? Will I take my rightful place or share my wisdom? This  post will contain heavy spoilers about TUNIC and is targeted at players who have played the game themselves, so you have been warned.

Going into this game I didn't really know much about it. I knew that it was an isometric Zelda-like with more difficult battles, similar to Death's Door. And I have seen parts of the early game from some coverage, giving me a first impression of its cute art style.

Overall, the beginning seems very straightforward: you get a stick and then you go for the sword and the Eastern Bell. So far so good. Page 10 of the manual also gives you a general to-do list of how to proceed afterwards, so that seems simple enough, but this is where I already had faced my first major problem:

How to get to the shield? Well, my actual problem was that I didn't see the key to the old house, because it's beneath a larger enemy that I didn't bother fighting yet. From within the old house you can easily get the shield, but page 10 doesn't mention that. It only mentions the sword and the lantern...

So, I assumed that the shield is found later and going into the house is the primary way of reaching the flooded well. Which it is, but I had found a different path, which let's you skip that, where from that path you can see the shield behind a barred gateway that can only be opened from the other side (which is the primary path, but I didn't get that). You can also spot a purple energy line, where I didn't understand yet what they are for or that they are essentially everywhere. I thought that it was a hint of how to get to the shield – just follow the line(s).

This train of thought led to a long journey through the game's first two dungeons, the Flooded Well and the Dark Tomb, through the West Garden and the Garden Knight, the first bigger boss in the game. All without a shield. However, already starting with the Flooded Well the game was designed with the shield in mind. You have the turrets, for example, or the exploding slimes with spin into you.

Needless to say that this was rather challenging, frustrating even for someone who came from Death's Door, where the game was designed around the dodge roll mechanic and I tried to play in a similar style. In TUNIC dodging is tied to stamina and you have to use it sparingly or get punished. And punished I got often, where I had to learn to use the sprinting instead (which is something I always wanted in Death's Door, ironically).

At least I had gotten the magic rod early or else the West Garden would have been insane without both the shield and a proper means to fight from a distance against the Fairies. And in hindsight I'm quite proud that I did all that without a shield on my first run, it was like a self-imposed challenge.

Afterwards I realized that these purple lines aren't really meant to lead you to the shield and that I must have missed something somewhere, but after defeating the Garden Knight that Envoy enemy didn't seem that threatening any longer and I finally got the key for the house and with it the shield.

Getting the shield made the combat finally click and the game became so much easier afterwards. So, the "self-imposed challenge" created a huge difficulty spike for me in the early game, one that wasn't to be matched until much later.

Well, the Siege Engine boss, which is what I did next, gave me a good challenge as well, until I learned that I just have to stay in its face, which is a good strategy for most of the bosses in this game, really...

The other big point of confusion and also some frustration was the Cathedral, which is probably the most questionable part of the game, because this is after you lost all your stats and then you have to best the most difficult battles in the game yet. Those are similar to the Avarice from Death's Door and that's not exactly easy if you can only get hit like twice...

So, I thought that I was missing something and played a bit too close to the manual. The page for the Cathedral (40) has this list of 13 steps through the dungeon, but each step is written in Trunic, so I didn't really understand what's going on. And it highlighted a treasure in step 8:

My idea was that maybe this treasure chest contains something that helps you with the battle at the end of the Cathedral and that you should get it before. That's not possible, because you need to return here during the day, but the manual explicitly stated that only the dead can get to this place (meaning you need to here by night)... So, I wasn't entirely sure, but this distracted me for quite a bit until I moved on.

Ultimately, the idea of the Cathedral battle is to cheese it bombs and similar items, don't even try to fight fair. They put a shop right before the battle for this very reason. Luckily, I was running back and forth through the Cathedral to find and potentially get that treasure under point 8, so that I had tons of gems and didn't have to worry about running out of bombs and stuff.

The crown with its zip zap ability is a really cool reward, even though it's a bit weird to traverse terrain with it at times, but this completely opens up the finale of the game. But once I had put myself back together with all the stats, I reached another impasse with the Heir, because this boss fight has proven to be too difficult for me.

The dead Librarian says something with the words "HEIR", "DEFEAT", "HOLY CROSS", and there is some mention of the Holy Cross in other places, which I was also still missing, or at least I thought I was. As a Zelda fan, you think of something like the cross from Zelda II - The Adventure of Link, a physical item that improves your powers. And I interpreted the three English words of the Librarian in two different ways:

• You need the Holy Cross to defeat the Heir, or...
• You obtain the Holy Cross after defeating the Heir.
  

Neither of these is correct, but I didn't really know what to do at this point, until I finally started to study the manual with more care and began to understand things. Not the language, but what it meant with "Holy Cross". Realizing that it's the D-pad and you had it all along was probably one of the biggest epiphanies in a video game for me.

And this is when the game starts getting crazy. Once you understand the Holy Cross, you will see its patterns everywhere. New ways open everywhere and everything in the manual is slowly coming together. But I was intrigued... I wanted to find everything, to discover every last secret. So, I took pen and paper in my hand, something I rarely ever do for a game, and started drawing all the patterns...

It was a long way until then, but figuring out the Golden Path and opening the door in the mountains is without a doubt among my proudest video game moments, next to beating the Path of Pain in Hollow Knight. Those are two very different paths, I can tell you that...

But having secrets upon secrets upon secrets in a video game and solving them was absolutely phenomenal. You know this feeling when you solve a puzzle in a Zelda game and you feel smart about it? Well, it's designed to do so, but TUNIC has taken that and amplified it by a thousand. No obvious hints, no sidekick to tell you anything, just lots of clever clues and a good amount of faith in its players. It's incredible.

And receiving the front page of the instruction booklet for your efforts, with the game's logo on it, was such a perfect reward for it. "There, you've mastered the game." I wasn't done yet, however, because I was still missing the back of the manual as well. Technically, you do need it to complete the Golden Path, but you can also make an educated guess there, which is what I did... So, I still had to look for the rest of the fairy souls.

The alternative ending, where you share you wisdom with the Heir, is equally moving and adorable. I absolutely loved it. Still, I also wanted to defeat the Heir normally for the bad ending, but that still wasn't in the cards for me. I can beat the first phase just fine, but the second phase gave me too much trouble.

But just like the Cathedral battle, there is some cheese for tha, where the fight becomes braindead easy with enough decoys. The Heir goes after them every single time and you can just mindlessly attack without having to worry... Probably the most anticlimactic way of finishing a game, but at least I've done it...

However, there was still more to uncover with the twelve Secret Treasures. They are purely optional in the game and don't give you any sort of advantage, but on Steam there is even an achievement for every one of them, so this was incentive enough to go after them. And even without, I was hooked and wanted more...

This is where I reached my limits, however. I was able to find nine of the treasures on my own, but for the last three I had to swallow my pride and get help from the internet. The first one was the spinning cube... Because of the distorted music I thought that this puzzle had to do something with sound, but that wasn't the case. You just have to follow the directions it spins, plain and simple.

One of the Secret Treasures is tied to a sound puzzle, however, where you have to keep listening to a wind chime and try to hear whether a note is lower a higher than before. That's freaking insane, but here I used a good tip that you can let the game display the music notes in the accessibility options. It's called "audio puzzle assistance" and I think this is only ever really used for this particular puzzle. But this made it easy enough to discover the Holy Cross path myself, after all.

Finally, there was one last chest, probably the most ridiculous, the one at the shore. For each Secret Treasure you can find a hint in the instruction booklet, where the last memo page tells you the numbers to understand what's even a hint to begin with. In this case it's "51 + 1", two pages marked with a star. And the idea with the water was really neat, but it only starts there... You get a secret message written in Trunic, and the only way to solve this puzzle is to actually learn the language after all. Ugh.

This opens a whole other can of worms for what's essentially one last treasure chest. I had achieved everything else, so it really now came to learning the language, which wasn't necessary until now... But I didn't want to give up so easily and I thought that I could get some clues, where the TUNIC Reddit is filled with topics about giving you hints how to start. I can be smart if I need to be, but I'm not a genius and failed to see the phonetic nature of the language.

But once I understood this, deciphering became a lot of fun, almost like another game within the game. The process took hours, but I was hooked and willing to figure out this one last puzzle... Only to look up the solution on the internet after all.

Problem was that what I had translated didn't really make much sense and I also had some mistakes in there, so I was as smart as I was before all that trouble. (I thought that I had to collect 11 feathers or something.) The accurately translated message is an English pun, a play on words going down, left, right... So, that was needlessly cryptic and a bit of a bummer there at the end.

I also didn't bother with the puzzle through the treasure chamber portal and just looked this up, where this doesn't unlock anything in the game and seems like it was meant to be more of a community effort.

Still, despite this one treasure, I had a lot of fun solving all the riddles and secrets of TUNIC. Coming from the Zelda series, this was really refreshing, because Nintendo would never dare to make a game like this these days, where you have to think completely out of the box and you may even have to take a pen in your hand to get a better understanding of how the world works.

However, after beating the game once, TUNIC has lost a lot of its magic. It's just not an experience that you can replicate again... I've started playing the New Game+, but when you know about all the secrets and already have all the items, it's really just not that good anymore. And the combat isn't all too great to give me the same replay value as Death's Door.

Maybe I'll go for the "Bring it to the wrong fight" achievement instead, where you have to find the gun before the sword. That will at least add another meaningful challenge, testing your knowledge of the game.

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.