TUNIC

The store page sells a tiny fox in a green tunic wandering a pretty isometric world with a sword, and for the first ninety minutes that is precisely what you get. Then the hand comes off your shoulder and the thing turns into the most demanding comprehension puzzle I have played in years. The cuteness is honest. The gentleness is a bait. Most of the text in TUNIC is written in an invented alphabet you cannot read, and working out what the game is trying to tell you is not flavor, it is the actual progression system. I went in expecting a Zelda tribute with a mascot. I came out with three pages of handwritten notes and a diagram. The central conceit is the instruction manual. Scattered across the world are folded pages of a 1990s-style console booklet, illustrated, cross-referenced, hand-annotated, mostly in runes. Collecting them teaches you the game: that a dash exists, that you can hold attack for a heavier swing, that a mechanic you had no idea about has been available since the opening beach. Occasionally a scribbled arrow in a margin points at a spot on a map you walked past six hours earlier, and the resulting sprint back across the map is one of the best feelings in the medium. Progression here is knowledge, not stats. You do not get stronger so much as you get less ignorant. Fans of Outer Wilds will recognize the shape immediately, though this version has teeth. Combat is straight Souls grammar in miniature. Stamina bar, roll with invincibility frames, sword and shield, lock-on, checkpoint shrines that restore you and respawn everything, dropped currency you scramble back to recover. Offerings at those shrines let you raise attack, defense, stamina and magic, and the item kit (bombs, firecracker, a magic dagger, an ice wand, the lantern) opens routes as much as it wins fights. The Garden Knight is a wall for a lot of players, the Librarian is a genuine skill check, and the Siege Engine is where the fixed camera starts working against you rather than for you. Worth knowing before you commit: the accessibility menu includes a no-fail toggle, and I think using it is completely defensible. The puzzle layer is the real content, and gating it behind boss execution serves nobody who is here for the secrets. Where it disappoints depends on what you want from an adventure. That gorgeous fixed isometric angle deliberately conceals things, which is delightful when it hides a staircase and maddening when it hides the archer plinking you from off-screen. The late secret hunting, particularly the directional-input puzzles, slides from clever into obtuse, and I would be lying if I said the community had nothing to do with my clean run. And as the RPG person on this team, I have to flag the obvious: there is nobody to talk to. No dialogue trees, no companions, no branching arcs, no character who changes because of a choice you made. The worldbuilding is genuinely deep, told through ruins, environmental staging and that untranslated manual, but it is archaeology rather than drama. If your favorite part of an RPG is a well-written argument with a party member, this will feel cold. Build variety is thin by design, which matters less than it sounds because the mainline run lands around ten to twelve hours and the full completion, second ending included, runs past twenty. Nothing here has to hold up at hour forty. Structurally it sits between Death's Door and Fez, with the melee weight of the former and the secret-language obsession of the latter, and it commits harder to the second half than either. The Very Positive standing is deserved, and so is the specific shape of the complaints inside it. Play it undocumented, with a notebook, offline if you can manage the discipline. Look things up and you have not made it easier, you have removed the game.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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