Tunic review: Don’t let Elden Ring overshadow this memorable Zelda-Souls hybrid

Game details

Developer: Andrew Shouldice
Publisher: Finji
Platform: Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, Mac
Release Date: Mar. 16, 2022
ESRB Rating: E for Everyone
Price: $30 (included in Xbox Game Pass)
Links: Xbox | Steam | GOG | Humble | Epic | Official website When I reviewed The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on Switch in 2019, I lamented its stubborn adherence to the past. I don't necessarily blame Nintendo for reproducing the Game Boy classic's elements wholesale, but the remaster's gorgeous, modern aesthetic, complete with 3D models replacing the original 2D sprites, started turning gears in my head. Could a modern game have classic-yet-fresh gameplay that feels as good as this remaster looks? I asked myself. What if a beautiful, top-down adventure could both evoke 8-bit Zelda nostalgia and implement more modern mechanics and ideas? In the modern gaming era, we've seen all manner of games borrow liberally from Nintendo's classic adventuring series, but they've mostly been on the 3D side.

This week's Tunic, a six-years-in-the-making indie adventure made primarily by sole developer Andrew Shouldice, is a rare example of a truly worthy 2D Zelda homage. It even surpasses other recommended modern titles like Death's Door, Hob, and, yes, Nintendo's own Link Between Worlds.

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This review, I'm afraid, will be vague out of necessity, as Tunic makes clear in its opening moments that it's meant to be peeled back one instruction manual page at a time. That's not a metaphor. Within minutes of beginning your top-down journey in Tunic as a cartoony, low-poly fox dressed in titular garb, you stumble across a glowing square. Pick it up, and a tiny piece of paper flies toward the screen and fills your view. In terms of size, orientation, and hand-drawn art, the page looks like it's been ripped from a 1980s NES instruction manual. It's not page one. And it's covered in a mix of English words and gibberish characters.

That gibberish appears on signs, as well, but Tunic doles out enough English words to clarify basic directions and instructions. And it evokes enough Zelda-like systems to goad players into running, attacking, and using items, while later instruction manual pages clarify Tunic's mechanics at length. In particular, its Souls-like convention of a dodge-roll, as managed by a stamina meter, gets a frame-by-frame breakdown of exactly how a dodge-roll's timing and temporary invulnerability works. And that explanation, like many others in Tunic, comes with an adorable hand-drawn fox somersaulting across the virtual instruction page.

Instruction manual transmission

I played Tunic's most recent free demo, which launched last year on Xbox consoles, so I can confirm that its devs responded to player feedback and tweaked combat in the final game to make its early stages feel gentler. Still, these milder sections hint at Souls. Your fox's health is precious, and while you can storm through baddies haphazardly, that will get your canine killed before long. Stop, study enemy attack patterns, dodge, strike, and survive.

Tunic's penalty for death may sound familiar to Dark Souls players: You'll revive at the last bonfire you touched (which always refills your health and revives non-boss enemies), and a portion of your in-game coins must be recovered from your point of death. This is a bit gentler than Souls, as Tunic doesn't punish you for not blowing through in-game cash. Which is good, because Tunic takes a while before telling players what its coins do.

The same goes for a lot of what you collect in Tunic. What's up with this inventory of special coins? What about these square patches with drawings on them? Did I just pick up a potion or a bomb? Tunic's doling of items is similar to the blind item variety in Binding of Isaac, though Tunic's scattered instructions eventually offer in-game tips, along with a bit of counter-logical advice for how some items work. I found myself delighted every time a newly discovered instruction page essentially told me, "Go ahead, do things that you might assume are wasteful in these games. We'll take care of you."

The coolest door switches in a Zelda-like game

Tunic is an aesthetic wonderland, and its beautiful environs refresh at 60 fps on hardware as weak as a base Xbox One. This is great news for anyone who's lucky enough to own a Steam Deck; despite the game not yet getting "Deck Verified" status, I can confirm that Tunic runs fantastically, with the exception of some shader cache stutters (see, it's not just you, Elden Ring). I have struggled to put into words how surprisingly majestic Tunic looks at its best. Its engine giddily leans into particle and lighting effects in ways that are astonishingly efficient, perhaps owing to the game's forced top-down perspective. Some of these moments are dreamy and psychedelic, but even the more grounded interludes have taken footholds in my mind—like my first summit atop a mountain rendered blindingly white with snow, or the time I thought I was opening a small door, only to see the cavern erupt in eerily staged sunlight, due to an unseen wall crumbling outside my camera's perspective. Tunic's creators have also made the ho-hum parts of adventuring look damned cool. Whenever your fox releases a ladder, unlocks a door, flips a switch, or activates a bridge, the resulting animations heave and thud with seemingly ancient mechanisms. Nothing in Tunic is handled in throwaway fashion. Everything in this game feels crafted.

ZeldaFezSouls? Yes, but also an identity all its own

The same goes for its adventuring paths, as Tunic is largely a wide-linear game in the style of the original Legend of Zelda. The game's 16-hour journey includes clear routes to major dungeon paths, and a few landmarks along the way scream, "Find the key to unlock this door to get this item to reach this area!" in that old Nintendo style. Between visual clues in the world and not-so-subtle nudges in the gathered instruction manual pages, Tunic also shoves players into checking every nook and cranny of its world, which feels staggeringly 8-bit. Your opinion may vary on this. The game's three-quarters camera perspective is mostly fixed, with the exception of a "focus" button that brings the camera to a bird's-eye perspective for improved combat visibility. Yet both of these angles intentionally obscure paths that would be obvious if you saw things from your fox's perspective. Walk up to what looks like a dead-end, and you'll find an invisible path or tunnel that leads you to a treasure. (Tunic is at least nice enough to make the treasure visible when you enter a zone. You'll know when you have some wall-hugging to do).

That's nothing compared to the mix of obvious and subtle mysteries hidden throughout Tunic. Here's an example: The instruction manual's gibberish indicates that you can expect Fez-like deciphering of a hidden language at some point. Going further than this would betray the discoveries that await, so I'll simply say that I prefer Tunic's handling of such a concept, along with how it mechanically opens up wider in terms of what it lets players hunt for. Still, you'll arguably want to have a friend to chat with once you reach the game's endgame secrets. Publisher Finji feels so strongly about this that it opened up a critics-exclusive Discord channel during the review period so that prerelease players could collaborate and ask each other questions. I've rarely seen such a gesture from game publishers, and I found it to be an adorable way to split the difference between getting completely stuck and having a game's surprises ruined by Reddit or YouTube. Thus, I encourage you to find a friend or two to asynchronously tag-team Tunic whenever you've gotten over 4,000 hours of Elden Ring. This surprisingly deep Zelda-like adventure is charming, evocative, fun, bursting with secrets, and comes complete with some of the best visuals and music of any "works-on-any-computer" adventure game over the past few years. Verdict: Don't wait for Tunic to land on our year-end list. Buy. Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.