Tunic Review:
Lost In Translation, Found In Legend

A sword comes down, a body falls, and a new hero rises. The game is won. Tunic, a game I started two years ago came to an end in October. I even got an achievement called “Game Over.”

And yet I still wasn't satisfied.

There were hints of more to this story constantly held over my head. There was clearly another way to beat the game, an ending just out of reach. Throughout my journey, there had been a part of Tunic that has continued to bother me, one that I had been determined to solve since I started playing: cracking the language of the game. There were secrets hidden behind it: pieces of lore, names, and treasures. Personal events and moving house had left my quest on the back burner until this past autumn, and while I was happy to see that I technically finished the game, I’m still working on translating the text of the game and finding the best ending.

Thankfully, neither of these tasks is too difficult due to one of Tunic’s most helpful and meta mechanics: the instruction booklet. Found piecemeal through the game, the instruction booklet expertly explains the controls and provides useful information for your quest with minimal intelligible language. This one piece of Tunic’s gameplay is a masterclass in effective communication and emergent gameplay that helps this Zelda-style game shine, making what would be a pretty standard adventure game and transforms it into something special.

As a warning, discussing pretty much ANYTHING in Tunic is a spoiler due to the instruction booklet being an in-game and meta mechanic. So while I will do my best to keep these to a minimum, be advised that there are some spoilers ahead. If you just want to know if this is a good old fashioned adventure game, then yes! It's very good, go get it.

A Boy Clad in Green

Tunic wears its inspiration on its sleeve, utilizing the note-taking exploration and problem-solving of the original Legend of Zelda to great effect. The original adventure through Hyrule was notorious for providing precious few hints in-game, leaving players to explore the world and discover its secrets with little guidance. For modern gamers, this can lead to complaints of having to look for guides and outside help to get through it.

While this could be seen as a detriment, it was actually the point to begin with. At least, kind of the point. In his keynote speech at the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Miyamoto expressed how he wanted to encourage people to talk to each other and share the discoveries they made in The Legend of Zelda. This wasn’t the only thing to help players on their journeys though, as the game came packaged with an instruction booklet (not surprising) and a map (more surprising). Both of these serve as the inspiration for Tunic’s instruction booklet, and the parallels are very obvious. Every page is filled with snippets of controls, item and enemy descriptions, maps that track your location, and even screenshots of gameplay reminiscent of the old booklets games used to come with.

The catch is that you don’t get the whole instruction booklet at the start of the game. You in fact start with none of it, and find the various pages of it as you progress through the game. This doesn’t stop you from exploring and finding things out on your own, of course. Your first combat encounter can happen well before you get the pages discussing dodge rolls and target lock-on, but you can still figure out these mechanics by simply playing the game. Finding the pages will open up your understanding of the world even further though, confirming suspicions you had or surprising you with new mechanics.

The magic really sets in though when you figure out someone has played the game before you. Some pages have handwritten notes scrawled on them, revealing secrets that you could perhaps find on your own, but that definitely help ease your exploration of the world. This drives home the idea of community-based exploration the original Zelda strived for and feels like you have a friend playing with you, passing down their experience along the way. It gives additional context to parts of the game without feeling too hand-holdy, tying the experience together into a great send up to the older generation games.

A Legend to Discover

Now finding the instruction booklet pages is all well and good, but there’s a slight problem you discover upon picking up your first page: Most of the text is written in a foreign script. This is a script created specifically for the game, but there is enough English text included to inform you that the script is for writing the English language, so it will be intelligible once you learn how it’s written. This choice to obscure so much of the instructions was of course a deliberate choice. In an interview with Game Developer in 2022, developer Andrew Shouldice stated they wanted to invoke a sense of wonder and being in a place you don’t belong, enticing the desire to explore further. At the time of the interview, they stated the script didn’t really mean anything, but that has since been proven wrong. As it turns out, you need to learn how to read the script in order to unlock certain secrets in the game, so if you want to 100% Tunic, you’ll need to do some linguistic analysis.

The stunning part in all this is that you can actually start piecing things together fairly early on. At a certain point in the midgame, I found the table of contents page for the booklet which had a number of sections listed in English along with their page numbers. One of these pages was the “Controls” page, one that you get very early in the game. When you look back at that page, you discover that the title of that page is written in the game’s script, granting the knowledge of how “Controls” is spelled. From there, I figured out the word for “Button” as well, giving me a base to start decoding the text and rewarding me for paying attention and exploring my resources.

While I’m still figuring out the language and how it’s written, I will say I’ve received a major clue and look forward to reading the full lore provided!

A Tool Spanning Decades

While the art of instruction booklets has fallen by the wayside these days, Tunic does a fantastic job implementing one that enhances the gameplay experience and encourages curiosity and exploration. Its Zelda-inspired design and nods to community-based exploration encourage the player to discover the world around them while its cryptic script entices players to learn more about the lore and secrets hidden within. It felt great jumping back in to tackle this game and finding those hidden secrets, even stumbling across some goodies I missed when I first started playing. If you haven’t explored Tunic and its colorful and whimsical story, please do. There’s so much to discover and accomplish ahead of you, and it truly is a special game where you can say you beat it and still want to go back to find more secrets.

Just make sure to get those booklet pages when you can. It’s dangerous to go alone, after all.