Stills from ‘Tunic’
Have you ever suddenly woken up and found that you were a fox armed with nothing but a stick in a strange forest land? I did, just last week. In Tunic, I played a fox, fighting away random blobby creatures with a stick. As I kept walking, I found chests hidden in obscure caves that sometimes held unappetising, sometimes dangerous fireworks, and if I was lucky—a page from a manuscript in a language that I could not read. Only, most of these cool items would be guarded by armed creatures that hurled balls of energy at me.
The universe of Tunic is shown from an isometric perspective, and has a pleasing artstyle. Tunic is like a low-definition Breath of the Wild game—while it doesn’t give as much variety in action, story, or movement, it kind of looks similar. It hardly has any dialogues, making it quite perfect if I want to spend short spurts of time attacking, parrying, and exploring expansive lands with forests and ancient ruins without paying close attention to the story. It really just drops the player into the middle of an adventure with no context, but somehow makes it easy enough to figure out.
The overarching objective of the game is to gain pages that form an ancient book—which also doubles up as the game’s instruction manual. Enemies regenerate when the game saves, which gets quite annoying. As a palliative, the game gives us some great music and interesting puzzles to solve.
An action game that also falls under a cozy-casual category, Tunic is best played on a portable console, or even a PC with a joystick controller. Unfortunately, I played it on my laptop with a keyboard—the worst way to enjoy this game, and 90 per cent of the reason I was not completely sold on Tunic. But the game is currently available for free on the PC Game Pass, and has a very breezy figure-it-out-as-you-go vibe to it: So, if you are a beginner looking for a new game, Tunic is a perfect place to start.
Anusha Ganapathi
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)
