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reviews are heavily tinkered with as I remember things like "having nintendo on the box means I round down" and "doing a quick editing pass is good"

you have been warned

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Found the secret ogre page

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GOTY '21

Participated in the 2021 Game of the Year Event

Favorite Games

Webbed
Webbed
We Know the Devil
We Know the Devil
Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds
Pocket Card Jockey
Pocket Card Jockey
Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin
Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

043

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

004

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Dec 07

Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds

Sep 30

Recently Reviewed See More

As someone who loves bugs (especially spiders), good movement, and unique control schemes, Webbed was basically made specifically for me.

I seriously cannot overstate how good the movement and controls are. Swinging around and using webs to create ramshackle structures and physics tools as this cute little spider gives me a schmovement high comparable only to Melee, which is basically a miracle considering 20+ years' worth of other games have failed to even come close. I want to speedrun this game sooooooooo bad, if only just to have an excuse to zip around in it regularly.

The "puzzles" are really more like little physics challenges thrown in to occasionally spice things up than actual puzzles, but I'll take any excuse the game gives me to try and make my webs-per-second speed even faster. There's actually lots of other fun little bonuses just thrown in like that too; other games wish they had an alternate movement tool as fun and unique as the skateboard or a hard to reach surprise as delightful as the hat button.

Everything about the game (including the adorable art, charming writing, and dynamic music/soundscapes) really works for me, and it's very quickly become a personal favorite of mine. Highly recommended, can't wait to see what this team does next.

This review contains spoilers

I should start by admitting that Tunic gave me writer’s block. I’ve managed to write some still-private snippets about games here and there, but nothing’s managed to escape the black hole of my very messy thoughts about Tunic. It kinda' broke my ability to talk about games for a while, and figuring out how to even explain how I feel about it required a bit of a rebuild of my approach to “reviewing” games. Let what follows stand as a messy first attempt at this.

Tunic draws on elements of a lot of other games, and plenty of people before me have pointed out what influences they see in it. Some of these make more sense to me than others: The Zelda comparisons seem relevant, the Dark Souls ones less so, et cetera.

But what’s really been stuck in my craw is Tunic’s similarity to The Witness, another game that I played obsessively and enjoyed a lot but have generally weird feelings about. Both are games with meticulously designed – or, perhaps more accurately, engineered – environments, a lack of almost any direct explanations of mechanics, a drip-feed of “revelations” about how the world around you works, and a reward for finishing the final challenge that in some ways feels more like a punishment. Tunic is definitely a more mechanically abundant game, what with all the items and enemies and bosses and such. But considering the final stretches of both games mostly involve trying to input the correct squiggly line from the environment to make particle effects pop out, is Tunic actually doing anything more interesting than The Witness?

To be clear, I like drawing the squiggly lines! I finished the Hall of the Mountain King challenge in The Witness back when I played it and loved every second of every attempt, and while I didn’t do whatever Tunic’s final puzzle with the golden statue realm is (too much work to collect all of them), finally unlocking the door on the mountain and the “true” ending was a real treat. And there’s plenty of other gameplay delights in Tunic too: the combat is pretty darn fun, the items all have clever alternate uses, and the boss fights are well-designed. The Librarian fight in particular is one of my favorite video game fights in a while, both mechanically and aesthetically.

But credit where credit’s due, The Witness at least has something going on narratively. Tunic’s “story”, if you can call it that, has some of those twists that are Super Cool and Mind-Blowing!™ when you see them for the first time in a game as, like, a 12-year-old and then become increasingly grating each time after. Basically some of that “Oh wow, doing the thing required to progress was actually a bad thing. Don’t you feel so guilty and complicit and betrayed????????????” Spec Ops: The Line-type stuff, ya’ know? All culminating in some sort of message in the “true ending” about how the real reward isn’t conquest but sharing knowledge, I guess? Really though, I feel like any attempt at analyzing any of it is just poking at crumbs. At least Tunic mercifully avoids being the equivalent of an absolutely exhausting novel chronicling how one man rediscovered the Tetris effect.

Despite that, Tunic does find time to rediscover something else from video games’ now distant past: the manual.

Every single page is lovingly detailed and an absolute delight to behold. The illustrations of our little fox friend’s adventures are so full of personality and life that the game loses basically nothing from not having an actual story. It’s all so compelling that I literally drew fan art of the characters mid-playthrough, something I’ve never done before. I would probably pay an ungodly amount of money to get my hands on a coffee table book-sized copy of it should such a print run ever happen. Heck, I’d buy a physical release of the game just for a regular ol’ manual-sized copy.

Having the manual pages pull double duty as the introduction to new mechanics is also just really clever. I have some beef with something I’m vaguely starting to phrase as the “wiki-fication of gaming” that I’d eventually like to talk about a lot more, but the important thing here is that having an in-game reference that answers a lot of questions you might have about how things work or where to go helps the player avoid relying on external sources of information to progress. Tunic’s manual and Outer Wilds’ ship log are the first two examples of this new-school style of finely tuned automatic note-taking aid that I can think of, and I can only hope that things like them are the future of game design.

Speaking of Outer Wilds, Tunic unfortunately falls into an environmental design trap that’s become a major gripe of mine ever since I finished Outer Wilds. I am, as Ian Danskin would put it, a futzer. And while I think being a futzer is a natural consequence of playing games long enough that you catch on to their tricks, I don’t think it has to be. The team at Mobius Digital went to painstaking lengths to remove as much extraneous or potentially distracting environmental detail as possible and tried to rein in the average player’s bad habit of scouring every last inch of every meaningless surface (spoilers for Outer Wilds in that video, fyi).

Maybe you don’t find yourself obsessively checking every nook and cranny of every environment before being willing to move on, and good for you if that’s the case. But I do, and the truth is it’s a nasty compulsion fostered by most games going out of their way to reward that kind of behavior with little bonus cocaine treats for the rats in your brain. In Tunic’s defense, I think the intent is for secret puzzles and treasure-hiding perspective trickery to evoke the feeling of finding world map shortcuts and extra heart pieces in Zelda games, but that still doesn’t make it a good design habit to indulge.

Now that we’ve brought up Zelda again, Tunic actually shares a funny quirk with Nintendo’s most recent mainline outing in Hyrule: the lack of any proper dungeons. Sure, I guess Breath of the Wild technically has dungeons in the four divine beasts, but they’re very basic compared to dungeons from previous games in the series. Tunic and BotW instead focus on complicating the journey through the overworld to reach a boss, both seemingly uninterested in having the boss’s lair require any sort of complex puzzle solving or intricate traversal. And the weird thing is older Zelda games did both! Climbing Death Mountain in A Link to the Past is a trial in and of itself, but then there’s also a full dungeon at the top. It’s a strange blind spot for both of these more recent games, especially considering how much Tunic’s manual stylistically echoes the original manual for ALttP.

And that’s sort of the thing with Tunic, isn’t it? It’s an experience that’s meant to harmonize with the echoes of other games you’ve still got rattling around in your skull. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s even a pretty great experience partly because of it. But at the end of the day, all it leaves me with is a distant feeling of polite pleasantness. It’s a shame that a game that leans so heavily on a sort of collective memory of “Video Games” doesn’t seem to have much of anything to say about it. Why do so many games endlessly paraphrase the design choices of “only research canonized or popular games…taken as law”? What is it about the manual that so many people’s nostalgia (including mine) often drifts back to? Is a “non-violent ending” still such an artistic aspiration in 2022 that it’s worth having it override what seems like a pretty cool final boss?

Tunic responds to all of that with a cute shrug and just heads back to the beach. Maybe that’s for the best.

Gave it a shot when it came to Game Pass. I thought its generally positive reputation meant that surely it wasn't as gruesome and cruel to Lara as I remembered hearing it was back when it came out.

Uhhhhh, yeah, no, it's that gruesome. Made it maaaaaybe 30 minutes in before I quit and uninstalled it. Opening with a sequence so creepily fixated on every second of Lara's agony was a Decision, and one that gave me zero faith that anything after that would be worth experiencing.