Now that E3 has wrapped up for another year, I’ve been working through the list of games I saw, played for myself, or interviewed developers about, piecing together articles about my favourite titles and moments from the best and most exhausting work week of the year.
This year, one of my favourite upcoming games is an indie title called Tunic. While it was first announced as Secret Legend back in 2015 and shown briefly at last year’s E3, Microsoft showed off a lot more of it last week during its Sunday briefing. You can check out the game’s latest trailer below.
As you can see, the game reeks of Zelda, but not in a way that feels like it’s trying to simply emulate it. After speaking with Tunic’s one-man dev team, Andrew Shouldice, it became clear that the ideas behind Tunic are far more interesting than they appear.
“Tunic is an isometric action adventure,” Shouldice said in a behind closed doors session with myself and a handful of fellow Aussie journalists. “It’s about three things: exploring the wilderness, fighting monsters, and finding secrets.”
Aesthetically, Tunic looks stunning, but don’t let it fool you – the game is not going to be easy. You’ll need to face off against a whole range of enemies, some of which you may not be prepared for. This comes down to the ability to enter areas you might not be equipped to handle without the game making that point clear, which is something Shouldice says is a deliberate decision.
“You can go into places where you’re not ready, just, you know, good luck,” he said. “It’s a game about feeling like you don’t belong, so being able to stumble into places that you’re unprepared for is a feeling I wanna try and capture.”
Shouldice says this desire to recreate a feeling of loneliness and unfamiliarity stems from a childhood experience. “I have memories of going to my next door neighbours house and they were playing their video games and I was left sort of leafing through the manuals while they were doing it,” he said.
“And so I had the impression of like, wow this is cool, I don’t understand any of this, because I’m like, four. And there’s this real feeling of, ‘this is not for me’, right? If I was to sit down and play this, this would be a sort of transgressive experience. That is really exciting to me.”
I feel like this point is most obviously represented in the game’s text, which, like the trailer, is completely illegible. I asked if the player will gain an understanding of this text as the game progresses, or if it’s simply there to confuse us.
“We don’t know what they say, it’s a mystery to everyone,” Shouldice said. “You don’t have to worry about the text. It could just be random garbage for all we know.”
While the Zelda influence is pretty obvious – and confirmed by Shouldice – he says Tunic will actually play a lot differently to Nintendo‘s popular franchise, making the similarities mainly aesthetic in nature.
“You are probably not going to be walking into a dungeon and seeing a bunch of blocks to push around to make a picture of something that unlocks a door,” he said. “It’s not that sort of thing, you’re not going to find many Rubiks Cube puzzle dungeons or anything.”
“You’re actually exploring this thing, you are not sort of following the yellow line that says, ‘and here’s where you solve the puzzle’.”
In terms of narrative, it seems like there’s certainly a lot to take in, but don’t expect any clear answers. In the same way the game leaves you to explore its world on your own terms, you’re also going to have to draw your own conclusions when it comes to story, Shouldice says.
The last thing discussed with Tunic’s creator was why he chose to make the playable character an adorable fox. “I was turned off by the idea of making a human-like character, just because it suddenly narrows the number of people who can look at it and easily identify with that character,” he said.
“The Fox, however – which, of all the anthropomorphic animals, is probably the best one – is racially ambiguous, gender ambiguous, anybody can be like, ‘that’s me, I’m gonna get up to some trouble as this fox’.”
He also adds that the shape of a fox, with it’s pointy head and bushy tail, make things like player facing and positioning more obvious.
While the game doesn’t have a release date just yet, Shouldice says he’s confident the game is close to its 12-month window, so there’s still a little while to wait for the moment. Tunic is certainly shaping up to be an amazing experience and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
