Tunic in the test: Cute my ass! This indie Zelda will challenge you

This is an article from our content partner "PC Games". Here you can find the original article by author Felix Schütz.

Tunic has no shortage of role models: Milestones like The Legend of Zelda and Dark Souls are cited, but indie hits like Hyper Light Drifter, Fez or the underrated Hob have also left their mark. Nearly six years of development time went into Tunic, which was mostly fleshed out and implemented by indie developer Andrew Shouldice. The result of his long toil: a clever gem for explorers looking for a challenge. Crisp battles and tricky puzzles will test even experienced players' patience, while complete beginners are best advised to steer clear of the game.

However, those who get involved will be rewarded with a motivating adventure that develops its very own identity over time and then clearly stands out from other "indie Zeldas". Despite some moments of frustration, we could hardly put Tunic down at some point and even after playing through it, we were still lured back by a few unsolved puzzles. Nevertheless, we do not give Tunic an unqualified recommendation. In the review, we clarify what you need to know before buying.

A little highlight for explorers

Even the opening scene could have been taken from Link's Awakening: Your character - a little fox in green robes - wakes up on a beach without any equipment, clues or goal. But before you even wonder what you have to do, the idiosyncratic graphic style already catches your eye: Tunic relies on a low-polygon, deliberately chunky look that exudes a beautiful diorama atmosphere with soft hues, cleverly used blur effects and sophisticated lighting. The highlight: The entire gameplay is presented from an isometric top view, so you can't move the camera freely, but only tilt it with a shoulder button. This means that you simply can't see some parts of the environment, because they are hidden by the level geometry - and it's precisely in these corners that the designers have preferred to hide their secret passages and treasures. Mastering Tunic therefore means stoically searching every nook and cranny, no matter how many times you might have walked past it. You will be surprised how many shortcuts and treasure chests you will stumble upon even after many hours!

Self is the fox!

Another reason why you discover a lot of things late (or maybe not at all): Tunic leaves you in the dark for a long time about how it works and what it's all about. The fantasy world is uninhabited at first glance, you only find a few signs, but most of the texts on them are in illegible symbols that don't get you anywhere. Only rarely do legible scraps of words appear, which at least give a rough direction: You have to ring magic bells, collect keys, open a gate and defeat some ancient evil - and how to do all that, you're supposed to figure out on your own. Tunic may have many strengths, but the holey story is definitely not one of them.

At the beginning you are still unarmed, but after a few minutes you get a stick and shortly after that a sword, with which you can not only mow down enemies, but also grass and bushes. This way you'll clear the next path, discover a cave, which will now lead you into a small forest. Soon you'll get a shield there, with which you'll keep enemies at bay and deflect projectiles. Most importantly, you'll learn how to use your limited stamina meter: Only if you block at the right moment or make a dodge roll will you stand a chance in the long run against all the monsters, swordsmen, giant spiders, undead, machines and occultists that aggressively attack you. (At the latest here it also becomes clear that Tunic is best played with the gamepad, the keyboard control is hardly usable). The enemies are dumb as pigs, but they deal out a lot and sometimes take up the chase. Therefore, always keep your eyes open for treasure chests, in which you'll discover enormously important items from time to time, with which you can permanently increase your fighting strength, stamina and defense. However, the game doesn't tell you exactly how this works, because you won't find any classic tutorials in Tunic.

Cryptic hints

Instead, you'll collect pages from a game manual along the way, which you assemble piece by piece and can study at any time in the pause menu. The digital booklet is beautifully designed in the style of old Nintendo classics and covers a whole lot from controls to useful maps to concrete puzzle tips. Fundamentally likeable: here and there you'll even find notes that look like someone scribbled them directly into the booklet with a ballpoint pen. The longer you play, the more pages you find, the more time you spend with the valuable manual - although it's basically a puzzle in itself. There's also a lot of text in cryptic symbolic language, and many notes and functions aren't even obvious at second glance. The manual is therefore not a panacea, if only because you are often confronted with features before you have found the appropriate page. So you have to find out for yourself what it's all about.

For example, sooner or later you will discover one of 15 coins. What to do with it? Try it out! From time to time you will also capture special cards that give you passive properties. But what exactly are these properties? For some cards, we still don't know - and we've played through the thing!

Even the Zelda-typical bombs we get early in the game surprised us: Tunic doesn't tell us at any point that you can use them not only to blow away groups of enemies, but also to blast open secret passages. There are no cracked walls, no hints of brittle areas, nothing you would expect in a game like this. You just have to try it out. Equally quirky, the more bombs we buy and use, the more the game gives us afterwards once we rest at a save point. The bomb supply gets bigger and bigger this way. A reason? The game does not provide it.

The magic hourglass, one of the most useful items in the entire game, is even completely optional: If you don't search the world thoroughly and always remember to tilt the perspective with the shoulder button, you might run straight past it - although it is extraordinarily practical at the latest during the tough final boss.

First intimidating, then motivating

Developer Shouldice obviously enjoys explaining as little as possible to you. You have to get involved with this, otherwise Tunic can quickly become a frustrating experience. Once you get used to some of the quirks, however, you can also sink into the game wonderfully, and this is especially true for exploring: Your adventure takes you through a central, cleverly constructed overworld, through which you can reach various zones and dungeons, including forests and half-sunken temples, a mine, sewers, a kind of underground factory or a graveyard that we can only enter in ghost form. Although the nested level design can seem intimidating at first, the world is actually surprisingly compact. Once you've discovered a few secret passages and quick travel points, you'll eventually find your way around effortlessly. This also makes the backtracking bearable.

The scope is still okay for the price of 28 Euros: You should plan on at least ten hours until you reach the final boss (nobody said anything about defeating him). If you also want to discover many secrets and crack puzzles along the way, you'll easily be busy for twice as long. We haven't seen everything even after 25 hours.

However, you can only fully explore some parts of the world once you have collected certain equipment, including a magic grappling hook, a magic wand or a gas mask. Before anyone shouts "Metroidvania!", we have to disappoint you: You'll find very few items overall, and some of the stuff is even completely optional. Around the middle of the game, for example, you'll find a shotgun of sorts, but we hardly ever used it. This also applies to the boss fights that await you at the end of the larger dungeons: Here you practically never need a special tool, but have to rely mainly on lightning-fast reflexes, a large bomb supply and your scarce healing potions. Some bosses can be bludgeoned without any stress, while others are really tough and will put even experienced players to the test.

Especially in the last third, two boss fights really annoyed us, and we found the final fight almost unfair. After more than twenty attempts, we managed to get through it, but only with a lot of healing items in our luggage, for which we had farmed up the necessary money. So you shouldn't underestimate the difficulty level: Where Dark Souls fans might only bat an eyelid wearily, "normal players" who expect a cozy indie Zelda in the style of Blossom Tales might reach their frustration limit more often.

Puzzles upon puzzles

In addition to the battles, the puzzles also reliably cause head-scratching: Namely, later in the game we get to know a kind of magic system that is operated entirely via the directional pad or the arrow keys (described in the game as a "holy cross"). Up, down, right, right, left, up, down, left - such key combinations are hidden everywhere in the game world, on walls, in tiles on the floor, even a few flowers or the wings of a windmill can contain a code. Sometimes you'll only realize after many hours that you've already walked past such a secret a dozen times. Some tasks you understand immediately, for others you have to think around the corner. The moment when you find the solution is all the more motivating!

The spells open secret gates, make treasure chests appear or open the way to hidden chambers. A special search spell towards the end also leads us to hidden fairies that we need to complete the important tutorial. This is actually fun and makes us search the world thoroughly for secrets once again. (Small tip: keep a piece of paper and pen ready!) However, the magic system is also annoying in the long run, especially when our inputs are not recognized correctly. Unfortunately, we can only guess why. There's also no way to save spells or combinations you already know, so you can have them quickly at hand. That would certainly have been more elegant.

Weaknesses in detail

Also questionable: When you open the inventory, the gameplay is not paused, so enemies can attack you unhindered. This is especially annoying because you can only assign three action keys with weapons, equipment or consumables. Since one slot is practically always occupied by the sword, only two slots remain. By the time you've fished the much-needed mana booster or ice bomb out of your backpack, a boss may already be closing in on you. A convenient DeepL access bar or at least an optional slow-motion effect could have alleviated frustration here. In the options menu, however, you'll only find a few loveless cheats, with which you can turn off the stamina consumption, for example. A second, "normal" difficulty level would have been much better for us, though.

Technically, Tunic ran mostly smoothly and very fluidly in our PC test version, but we discovered a few bugs in the level geometry here and there. In the mine area, for example, we promptly slid through the floor and fell to our deaths when looking behind a hill. With a special upgrade, which you only get shortly before the end, your fox can also dash through the game world at lightning speed - this is extremely practical, but it can also happen here and there that you clip through walls or land in a place where you shouldn't actually be. This is not earth-shattering, but it still feels a bit messy.

The cute facade is deceptive: Tunic is not aimed at beginners!

Tunic didn't make it easy for me: the clues, which were vague at best, the tricky battles, and the many moments when I really pondered what the game actually wanted from me intimidated me at first. But after a while, the spark took hold and I could hardly put it down: Tunic wears its cryptic concept a bit too proudly for my taste, but those who get involved are also rewarded with an atmospheric, challenging and surprisingly motivating adventure that you gradually decipher for yourself. Above all, explorers and puzzle fans who want to turn over every stone in a game world will get their money's worth. However, those who expect a solid story and quickly throw in the towel at tricky bosses should better give the game a wide berth. My tip for those who are looking for a more classic Zelda experience: Go for Blossom Tales or Ocean's Heart instead. But if you want a game that doesn't chew you over for a change, Tunic is the indie adventure for you.

Tunic is available for Xbox Series S/X, Xbox One and PC, priced at 28 Euros. Contrary to earlier reports, Tunic is also already included in the Xbox Game Pass at launch. However, we only had the PC version for testing, the console version wasn't quite final yet according to the developer. We will add the Xbox rating shortly. The PC version of Tunic is available via Steam, Epic Games, GOG and Humble Store. There is no voice output, but the (readable) texts are optionally in German.