Top Game of 2022: No. 1 - Tunic

1. Tunic, dev. Andrew Shouldice

I got my wish. That doesn't always happen in this life, so we should cherish these moments. 

Tunic was the game I most anticipated back in the beginning of 2022, and now it is my Game of the Year. However, in fairness, my called shot did not come out of nowhere. I did play the Tunic demo back in 2021 and put it down after only a short period. There's two reasons why that happens. Most of the time, the demo has already dissuaded you from continuing with the game. But sometimes you realize this game is going to be so good, so special, that you want to save all your passion and energy for the full experience. That was Tunic. The final complete Tunic was everything I wanted and more.

We basically do not get classic Zelda games anymore. Besides a remake of Link's Awakening, the last fully new one of those was A Link Between Worlds for the 3DS. (Itself largely a remake of A Link to the Past.) The Crypt of the Necrodancer people have more original top-down Zeldas for the Switch than Nintendo has! So I was more than starving for some games of that style. Importantly, Tunic offers a particularly adorable spin on things by transforming Link into the most precious little tiny fox guy.

Aww, look at him yawning on the beach! You can barely hear it in the sound mix, but he makes little cooing sounds! He's the best!

Tunic has the costume, it has a starting weapon in the first cave to your left, and it has a difficult non-linear overworld. You can see a deep reverence for The Legend of Zelda, the O.G. from 1985, even down to recreating the instruction manual. The manual ends up being a very important element to this experience. It is where Tunic becomes more than imitation, into something more meta. I would already love Tunic if it were just a really fun isometric copy-cat with a delightful plastic toy box aesthetic. But this game has much more on its mind.

I still buy physical media. Honestly, I do not why because jewel cases these days are empty, and even the discs/cartridges themselves are basically just download codes. Maybe I just want to keep GameStop in business, I dunno. I already sound old when I talk about "back in my day", but we used to build shit in this country and we used to get things in our games. You had to walk fifteen miles in the snow to go to school, and your games came with beautifully-illustrated companion pieces. This was especially important back in the 8-bit days (pre-Eric, I'm not that old). The first Zelda could only fit 128kbs into its cartridge, so there was not much room for story, and nobody built tutorials into games yet. The only help you got came with the companion booklet, that was essential to the game. Without the pages, you had to reply on magazines, schoolyard rumor, or random chance to play it.

With perfect knowledge, Tunic is a trivial experience, which speedrunners can complete in mere minutes. However, Tunic is all about tricks, all about a puzzle whose pieces you cannot see. So we start with no knowledge, no pages of the instructions. All you have is instinct from Zelda experience, blind luck, and a wooden stick you found in a cave.

Tunic, very cleverly makes the manual part of the game. These pages are items scattered all across the world, all clearly drawn in the style of the Zelda NES instruction booklet. (They went so far as to even imitate the small errors a physically-printed booklet would have in its color illustrations.) This allows for Tunic to control the player's knowledge. Some pages are the map, some tell you important gameplay mechanics such as the exhaustion system, some give you hints as to what the blueberry item might do. Another layer of the puzzle is the script is the manual is written in, which is these complex geometric runes. But like much of this game, it's only a sight-line trick. The script is English but written with a phonetic alphabet. Redditors solved the whole language injust a few weeks (Big Spoilers).

Like the language and the manual pages, Tunic's overworld map is full of things hidden in plain sight. The isometric perspective is not just retro, it's key to the illusion. The camera angle is hiding all kinds of secret passages and short cuts. Some of these are painful to discover, you will have spent an hour fighting through a horde of tough enemies, until you realize that hugging the corner takes you to a passage right to the area with the Shield.

This all opens up another question. What is the game we're playing? Yeah, there is the game of the little furry Link fighting through monsters. But also, Tunic has a metagame occurring with the manual and the very structure of the world. You find a foreboding library tower, now abandoned like most things in this world. Inside, somebody has been fiddling with and experimenting with the core gameplay objects, such as the Save Points and teleportation squares. In most games these would be merely abstract concepts, in the game but not "real" to the characters. Cloud Strife has no knowledge of saving the game when he's in Midgar. But in Tunic these objects have a physical reality now. Somebody is aware of them and their functions and is trying to unlock a deeper truth. During the course of the adventure, Fox-Link goes from a very Hyrulian overworld down into deep horrifying depths. You're literally exploring the mechanical depths of Tunic's interface. This whole world is a construction for a mysterious, nefarious purpose. 

Unfortunately, you never do get the confront the sinister architects of Tunic's universe. What you get instead is several difficult bosses, including a very challenging final boss that pushes your skills to the limit. I've talked a lot about Tunic in the last year, and a lot of people I know had difficulty with the combat. Somebody might say it's "Soulsy", but everything has some Souls DNA now. Tunic punishes your mistakes without much forgiveness. Also, the whole flow is tuned a bit strangely. The rhythms of your actions do not seem connect unless you lock onto enemies, which somehow makes the dodging and countering all connect much better. I love the boss fights, even the final boss, which took me days to beat. That victory was the most satisfying gaming accomplishment of the year for me. But winning is not the whole story. 

As I asked before, what game is Tunic? If you beat the boss, all you've done is complete a sequence of events pre-planned by whatever force has created this world. You can actually go further, you can find another depth to the mystery. I wish I could say I loved that element of Tunic as much as anything else. I greatly cherish the art style, the chill low-fi beats soundtrack, the cycle of exploration, and even growing my skills with the combat. However, once Tunic started moving into Fez or The Witness territory, it lost me. Those puzzles are too abstract for my brain. I would have needed to look online to complete all that.

I also feel like that's defeating the purpose. Tunic gives you all the resources you need to beat it and beat its meta-game. To just run your question by a search engine is destroying the mystery. The game is not merely the buttons you press to complete the mechanical challenge, Tunic is the knowledge you have and the knowledge do not have. I'm usually not a guy who cares at all about spoilers, however, once you're checking Youtube for hints, you're not really playing Tunic anymore. You're only playing half the game now.

(That said, if you need help, go get it. Fuck those "you cheated yourself" people. Tunic includes various accessibility options, including a No Fail mode. If you just want to enjoy the puzzles, you can make your fox invincible and have fun. Nobody is kink-shaming here, there's a reason I played Tunic and not Elden Ring.)

Tunic is the kind of experience that reminds us that games are objects with mass, constructed out of parts, not actually worlds. The magic is all only skin-deep. The illusion of a video game is that you press a button and the little guy in the game moves. You are led to believe the inputs come from you into the game, and you become the master making the decisions. However, what we see on the surface is just a single slice of a vast mechanical apparatus with all sorts of hidden functions and systems. There were decisions made about what you have access to and how you get them. The author's will is always here in the puzzle box they designed. The game was built for a purpose, and you're being guided towards it. Maybe those purposes are high-minded, maybe they're just innocently trying to entertain you, maybe their goals are unspeakable. However, somebody built this thing to do something to you. The final output is never the little guy winning their story. There is no little guy, they do not exist. The only true output is you, changed by the gaming experience.

Keep that in mind when you're playing in 2023. It's embarrassingly late to be saying this, but Happy New Year.