After finishing both Sable and State of Decay 2 on the Xbox Series S, I was ready for a new game and I found it one reading a review of Tunic online. Much like Sable, Tunic appears to be a homage to Zelda games, but more of the 2D Zelda games of old, re-imagined with beautiful, soft-focus watercolor-like graphics…even the biped fox hero that the player is controlling comes with a green color tunic.
The game utilizes an isometric view, much like Diablo, and one may argue that that ARPG has influenced this new game as well. The game starts with players controlling the aforementioned cute fox hero, washed off to shores unknown. While armed from the start with a stick, you’ll quickly learn a couple of things, first being details are really sparse about the game.
You’ll spend some time piecing together the game manual scattered throughout the game world and its dungeons, and this is important as some of these pieces contain maps and guides as well as tips on items, weapons, etc; so do look out for those game manual pieces.
Secondly,, combat can be both an interesting and infuriating experience. Having already played Sable with its no combat gameplay, and spent many a night killing zombies in State of Decay 2, I didn’t want my green little fox to be turned into mincemeat every few minutes. Hence, the no-fail-mode (basically, invincibility) option under the accessibility options in Tunic, is such a boon. I would rather much focus on uncovering the story by exploration, without worrying about dying all the time.
Even without the pain of dying, the game is tough. The fixed camera view make the exploration bit hard but don’t let that stop you as you need to uncover stronger, more potent weapons, items and power-ups in order to get to places to advance the storyline (and to make fights easier). The boss fights were a surprise in this game, and I’ve gone through a several, with each boss being bigger than the last. It pays well to observe their patterns in order to be able to engage them without taking too much damage.
Tunic plays really well on the Xbox Series S and on my gaming rig (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070), and it’s available on Game Pass, so do check it out and let me know what you think. I for one highly recommend it.
