Tunic Review

The structural idea here is the best kind of clever, which is the kind that changes how you play rather than how you feel about the designer. Scattered through the world are pages of a printed manual in the style of a 1990s console booklet, illustrated and annotated, written almost entirely in a constructed script. You cannot read the words, but you can read the diagrams, and a hand drawn arrow on a map page will teach you a secret passage more effectively than any quest marker.

By the late game the manual has become a genuine puzzle document, and the final sequence asks you to input something you had to decode from it, which is a swing almost nobody attempts. The world folds back on itself in the way the best Metroid influenced games do. Combat is the weak leg, a stamina based lock on system that never gets interesting and produces two boss fights that will stop players cold. There is an assist mode, and no shame in using it.