• Game: Finji's Tunic.
• Release Month: March.
• Quick Look: Here (Jan / Bakalar).
• Started: 02/12.
• Completed: 04/12.

Man, if you asked me before 2022 started which, between an Indie Zelda-like with a cute little fox guy protagonist or the one Souls game from that year, was going to give me the most trouble with its boss fights, I probably would've lost money on that bet. Or maybe not, since I'm a fan of incongruities. Either way, there's a lot that's utterly delightful about the vulpine Tunic and a smaller amount that is less good. We'll get into all that. Tunic drops you off on a beach with nothing but your namesake apparel—the similarities to the recent Link's Awakening remake don't end there either oh my, no—and leaves you to your devices trying to figure out where to go in this striking isometric world of simple colors and contours in a very stylish and effects-heavy 3D presentation. Your only guidance early on are pages left over from an old game manual that have somehow found themselves inside this world, with each leaf providing some vague idea about what you can do and where you should go. A level of obfuscation settles in soon with how almost everything is written in a fictional language—fortunately, unlike Fez, you don't need to translate a lot of it to get the gist of what it's saying—and the game continues to be relatively tight-lipped about its mechanics, rules, and direction until more manual pages are found.

If you've heard people talking about the game since it released last spring, they probably uttered the word "manual" every other sentence because it really is a masterful way to implement what was once a trusty companion in any 8-bit or 16-bit release that didn't feel the need to reiterate in-game what was already explained in the supplementary material (and if you had the gall to pirate it and thus had no manual to begin with, well, I'm sure the developers had an entire concerto of tiny violins prepared for your confused frustration). The manual does more than just tell you what enemies are called and some rough maps for you to follow: there are actual mechanics you need to know buried in those pages, to the extent that coming across a certain section might change the way you approach an entire aspect of the game. For instance, and without giving away too much, you might walk past some ominous black monoliths, wells, or a yellow square on the ground that offer no immediately obvious utility: finding the right manual page, however, might have you feverishly returning to any or all the above now that you know what their deal is.

What tends to hit you after the visuals and this curious but very deliberate dripfeeding of instructions on essential game mechanics is the game's harsh difficulty. I'd say it goes a couple notches beyond most games of its type, even those that are clearly prostrating themselves at the Altar of From: Tunic is no different in that regard, with the requisite corpse run feature (which also doubles as a nice little smart bomb, giving your second (or third, or tenth) attempt against a boss a headstart) and a set of curatives that are replenished after resting at a checkpoint at the cost of resetting all the local hostile fauna. You absolutely need to be on the top of your dodge and strike game, and maybe have found all the upgrades going, to stand a chance against many of the late-game bosses, though it does at least ramp you up slowly with some basic "use the shield, dummy" techniques to master first. The lock-on is vital to track your foes in a 3D game like this, even with the fixed angled perspective, and studying all your opponents' moves and especially their active ranges carefully never goes amiss as a strategy. You can also try the parry the game offers you, though it's about as challenging to time it right as it is in any Soulslike you'd care to mention and a good way to get jabbed in the face over and over as you swing your shield just a little bit too late or early. The combat is generally pretty sharp and responsive, though the challenge level might seem a tad gratuitous given the game's more casual-leaning cutesy look and its strong emphasis on puzzles (mostly in the meta sense) elsewhere. It's like if someone threw in a Cyberdemon in the final moments of Portal rather than an endlessly passive-aggressive computer.

As for those puzzles, well... I guess I could conceive of a time near the game's release where people were getting excited to solve them as part of a group, glued to their friend Discords if not scouring the internet en masse for any new tidbit or hidden area someone had accidentally discovered. To call many of the optional puzzles in Tunic abstruse would be understatement; even the Riddler would look at this game askew and say "well, you gotta give them something to go on". The Fez aspirations become prominent a little further in once you're done poking into every nook and cranny for valuables and start noticing telltale patterns everywhere, but there's layers that go deeper still that I'm sure some designer somewhere is chuckling to himself for hiding so much in plain sight. I'm certainly not opposed to some meta fuckery in my games, provided I don't have to keep exiting out of the application to go check some game folder for its mysterious new contents, but Tunic's already juggling so much. Thankfully, the super secret stuff is almost all completely optional: as in, it won't lead to anything useful you might need to tip the balance of a troublesome boss encounter in your favor. If the extent of your secret discovery is finding hidden passageways concealed by the inconvenient way the isometric obscures certain angles in the level design, the rewards should probably be enough to get you through to the end provided you have the patience for a final boss that will heal itself back to full after its first defeat and then start lowering your maximum HP with every hit (and I almost didn't, despite riposting my way through several dozen fights much like it throughout Elden Ring of late). I couldn't really tell you why I felt put out by the more subtle puzzles in the game beyond being a little too esoteric for their own good: the manual does tell you about them at least, albeit in a very indirect manner.

Tunic's the sort of game I could walk away from thinking there's no way it leaves my top ten this year, just from the level of craft behind it alone. The ingenious implementation of an illustrated manual as some kind of sacred document of profound truth is an all-time great innovation that made every page a more valuable find than any health upgrade or piece of traversal-enabling gear. But then I sit on it a little longer and realize that so much of the playthrough was spent in a state of mild irritation, from the tough fights with some harsh hitboxes, or the self-satisfied puzzles, or the slightly unintuitive way that LT was tied to lock-ons and RT to the shield when it feels like it should be the opposite, or how going into the inventory doesn't pause the game because I guess it wasn't already Soulsy enough. This might be another case like Outer Wilds where I have a game I objectively think is wonderful and would recommend to anyone (allowing for a certain skill threshold; maybe not one for the casuals drawn in by the cute fox art) where I can't help but feel rubbed the wrong way regardless. I guess we'll see if this is an isolated incident or I'm just extra pissy this month as we continue filling out that top ten.

Current GOTY

1. Elden Ring
2. Tunic
3. HoloCure

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2022