Reviews: Tunic

Keep your wits about you and be brave, little fox! Steam Deck review.

About the game

Explore a land filled with lost legends, ancient powers, and ferocious monsters in TUNIC, an isometric action game about a small fox on a big adventure.

Steam page

Margot’s stats

• Device: Steam Deck Oled

• Difficulty: Easy combat

• Completed: yes - main story

• Time: ~11.5 hours

• Summary:

• Verdict: Highly recommend if you like puzzles, hidden paths and secrets. Main thing to be aware of is that it does not tell you anything. The main objective is to collect the various manual pages and these are always partially written in a foreign language. To me this was all a great and fun challenge, but I can see how it may frustrate others. Combat is simple but challenging.

  This was a fun game to play on the steam deck. I did have to tweak the settings a bit as it kept trying to run on a really high frame rate causing the fan to go, so I locked it down to 45 FPS and got plenty of game play time.

• For more steam deck related settings, this is a great post.

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Narrative & Gameplay

I am not sure how much to really reveal here about the narrative as the whole point of the game seems to be that you figure this out yourself. There is no real tutorial as such as you collect the pieces of the instruction booklet and each page reveals a bit more of the world.

Any signs you see are not necessarily written in a language you will recognise and hence finding the pages of the booklets becomes more important. While not all worlds will be in English in the booklet the drawings will help to make sense of the meaning.

I saw an interview with the developers where they said, they wanted to make the world feel like it wasn't for the fox, hence the fox cannot understand anything.

How did this all feel for me? Well I think I am a special case here, because I played many English only games while growing up when I didn’t speak the language. Eventually I matched words like “Poison” and that this is a bad state and it goes away with the item labelled “Antidote”. I discovered these things through trial and error and kinda reverted to this approach to gaming in Tunic. It was a nice way to reminisce and rediscover different approaches to gaming. I can see though how this could make others frustrated especially if you expect some sort of tutorial.

For me the effect of discovering mechanics or hidden rooms and puzzles is really satisfying and made me want to pick it up over and over again. I sped through the 12 hours of game play.

In terms of gameplay and look and feel this is an isometrics view game and some hidden angles are actually accessible which made it fun to explore. You have to think outside of the box a lot to get around, which reminded me a bit of when I first played Monument valley.

Overall the game looks and feels quite like a Zelda game, like Link’s Awakening for the Switch. You have a little sword you can cut bushes down with and destroy barrels with.

The combat is simple by design but challenging to execute, especially as the rolling mechanic is very specific for you to avoid being hit. However as long as you figure out the upgrade mechanics, every boss encounter was very doable.

Beyond the sword you unlock other abilities and tools, which can help you along the way. Once you unlock something it generally gave you the ability to reach another area or piece of the booklet. This mechanic is something I really enjoy, despite there not being a proper map for you to use. I just about managed not to get lost. Only once for an hour did I not figure out what to do, and surprisingly I kept going instead of googling. I searched for something twice, only which I am impressed with myself with. :D

I often will avoid getting frustrated and just look something up. That is a nice thing about playing older games. haha.

Tunic really hit a lovely spot for me. It was cute, challenging and full of fun secrets. I found it really engaging and satisfying to play.

Verdict

Highly recommend if you like puzzles, hidden paths and secrets. Main thing to be aware of is that it does not tell you anything. The main objective is to collect the various manual pages and these are always partially written in a foreign language. To me this was all a great and fun challenge, but I can see how it may frustrate others. Combat is simple but challenging.

This was a fun game to play on the steam deck. I did have to tweak the settings a bit as it kept trying to run on a really high frame rate causing the fan to go, so I locked it down to 45 FPS and got plenty of game play time.

Have you played Tunic? Did you finish it or was it too obscure?