Tunic brings the joy of discovery back to games — if you look for it

You awaken on the shore, a strange fox in a strange land. The afternoon light casts long shadows over a geometric landscape of flat blue sea and angular shrubs. Lacking any particular instruction, you follow a path uphill that leads to a golden platform. It looks important but when you stand on it, nothing happens. Usually at around this point, a game starts telling you what to do, gently introducing you to its controls, systems and fiction. Tunic remains stubbornly mute.

Further uphill is a signpost — finally, you think, a little guidance. But the sign is written in an unfamiliar language, runes resembling no human script. At this point, the game’s inscrutability begins to feel like a joke on the developer’s part. Yet rather than mocking you, the game is in fact telling you everything you need to know — that this is an adventure you must undertake alone without explicit guidance. Tunic will not tell you where to go, you must explore for yourself. It will not tell you what an item does, you must try it and see. It will not give up its secrets unless you seek them out.

You are given just one source of information — an in-game instruction manual whose loose pages you can find scattered around the environment. Each scrap offers clues about where to go and how to play, but you’ll be reliant on the pictures alone because, naturally, the text is written almost entirely in runes. This booklet is a paean to gaming history, reminiscent of the lovingly-made manuals that were often packaged with games back when we still bought them as physical media.

There are many games that keep their secrets hidden, but few are brave enough to refuse even to tell you how to play. In Tunic you will have to work out for yourself how to run or level up your skills, often learning that you had an ability or access to a shortcut that you could have been using all along, had you known it was there. There is something quietly profound about a game that doesn’t expect you constantly to acquire new moves, but asks you instead to look within and discover the true extent of your abilities.

This thoughtful ethos is threaded through every layer of Tunic, a passion project by Canadian developer Andrew Shouldice, who spent seven years making it, mostly alone. The result feels singular yet also indebted to gaming history. Its top-down perspective and endless waves of slashable monsters recall recent indie games such as Hades and Death’s Door, but deeper in this game’s DNA are more ambitious references: to the way Elden Ring plays with death and combat, the sophisticated meta-puzzles of Fez and the obscure secrets in classic Mario and Zelda.

The environment comes to life, each polygon vibrating with mystery and potential meaning

Tunic’s toybox world is packed with doors, passageways and treasure chests hidden by tricks of perspective. Once you realise that any object, from a rock to a tree to an inconspicuous stretch of wall, might conceal a secret, you start reading the space differently. The entire environment comes to life, each polygon vibrating with mystery and potential meaning.

There are bigger puzzles, too. Sometimes you might come across a treasure chest that has already been plundered — but by whom? Look for answers in your manual and you might notice that someone has scrawled cryptically with a biro in its margins. What begins as a simple, cutesy action-adventure unfolds dizzyingly into a postmodern narrative with sophisticated themes. It’s a journey best undertaken unspoilt.

Inevitably, a game that relies so much on secrecy occasionally frustrates, crossing the line from “deliciously fiendish” to “frustratingly obtuse”. Added to this, the quality of the game’s design and soundtrack is not matched by its simplistic combat, which can feel clumsy. For those who find the gruelling boss battles an unwelcome obstacle, there is a “no fail” mode in the accessibility settings that allows players to focus simply on puzzles and exploration.

These are relatively small quibbles in a game that does something remarkably rare: respects players enough to let them find their own way. In doing so, Tunic evokes the pure, childlike joy of discovery, something that is all too often lost in contemporary blockbusters.

Out now on Mac, PC and Xbox, and currently available on Xbox Game Pass