Tunic is Deceptively Brilliant

oi oi, chew-nic, innit? This game left a serious impression on me so I'm glad I was able to get this finished. Especially glad to get it finished today because tomorrow (as of publishing) is my birthday! And I'll be damned if I'm going to spend it staring at an editing timeline... As always, more stuff to come, so stay tunic err... tuned.

I love how Tunic is bold enough to wear its inspirations on its sleeve, but still is able to stand on its own two feet. You think you’re playing a Zelda clone, until you realize it’s actually a Souls-like, but wait…no, actually-actually, it’s its own thing and that is…a puzzly, cutesy, horror?! It deserves all the praise it’s getting and you summed why up so well: a masterclass in subliminal nostalgia.

"I thought the Holy Cross was just this one input on the D-Pad" STOP THIS IS LITERALLY MY PLAYTHROUGH

I feel too many people are intimidated by the mountain door. I have never felt more rewarded or excited by a game for actually legitimately solving that puzzle and encourage anyone to give it a go. It's more fun than it looks

gosh, the golden path never fails to make me emotional. especially after all that was required to do!

Your experience with the Door in the Mountain hits home. I missed THE EXACT SAME marking on page 52. My saving grace was counting out the inputs I had, realizing there were only 99, and concluding that an even 100 was too perfect to be coincidence.

There's also the fact that finding all the optional [redacted] and [redacted] and then going through the [redacted] gives you a link...to a real-world website...that explains how the game uses music as a THIRD language. The Tunic rabbit hole (fox hole?) just doesn't end.

20:15 I HAD THE EXACT SAME ERROR LMAO I was like "I checked everything 3 times, why is it not working??" and then I felt like an idiot on the 4º check when I found out

I really hope more people play this game. Absolutely a GOTY contender in my book

I just got 100% in the game yesterday, and was going to start on Super Mario Wonder today. But instead, I spent most of the day looking up lore videos and reviews (your video is my latest stop. Loved it, by the way!). Like you did, I just cannot seem to leave the world of Tunic yet. I was in love with the exploration and puzzle elements of this game. Going into this totally blind, I managed to collect every upgrade treasure, every coin, and almost every equipment card (At the very end of the game, while looking up what all of them do, exactly, I somehow learned that there was a secret one not mentioned in the manual! It made fighting the Heir so much easier). I got all but 1 fairy, all but one trophy, and managed to solve the entire Golden Path puzzle all on my own. I felt so bad having to look up the answers to those last few puzzles, but in doing so fell down a fucking rabbit hole like you wouldn't believe. Did you know that there's an option in Accessibility Settings to make audio puzzles easier? Knowing that sure would have helped in figuring out what's going on with those windchimes outside the Old House. Were you also bashing your head against the wall trying to figure out what the "60 seconds", "Shhh..." was about on page 51, with the illustration that looked like a star partly underwater next to a piece of paper? (Even as I type this I'm having to boot up Tunic again for reference) The one that, if I'm reading page 54's hint correctly, surely holds the final trophy? Apparently, you have to turn off Sound Effects under the Audio options and stand in water for 60 seconds. Doing so will cause a secret message to appear at the bottom of the "Thank you!" note by the devs on page 1 (which bears a similar star symbol). Said message consists of more game language and a drawing of a familiar landmark in the overworld which is shaped like Holy Cross directions. Ah! So that's it! If everything the game taught me so far is correct, I just have to go there and input the directions to get the final gold treasure!...WRONG! At this point, it would be very, VERY handy to know what the note next to the image says. Throughout my journey thus far, I noticed that the game language doesn't appear to be random runic scribblings of a non-language. There are certain shapes that repeat in ways consistent with language which has had some thought put into making it. Furthermore, what of the notes on pages 21 and 54? They appear to be some sort of clue to how you could go about deciphering it, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The game isn't over yet. THE. GAME. ISN'T. OVER. YET. The game expected me to decode an entire in-game language. A multi-hour task, if you even know where to start (not me!). This is the hardest task this game has asked of me at this point. But thank goodness there's a awesome community of clever Tunic fans that managed to translate this thing (Bravo! <3 <3 <3). Deeper down the rabbit hole we go! WAHOO! For the first time, I was able to actually read and understand the story, the descriptions of the Quarry, Ruined Atol, Graveyard, and Cathedral, as well as what they were saying about the bosses I fought and what their deal was. I love the Librarian and his tragic story of how he thinks the Holy Cross is an actual treasure hidden in the Cathedral. He's also the only character aware he's in a game (did you see the drawings of what appeared to be a game cartridge on one of his chalk boards?) But that's all I'll get into on that. This is about the puzzle. Even now I'm getting as distracted from the task as I originally was! As for the puzzle text, after doing all of that you'd surely think it'd just spell it out for you at this point. But you're still no closer to getting that last trophy. It's a riddle: "The softest feather corrected eleven times departed once more" What does that even mean? I tried inputting the landmark's directions 11 times, from several points of view. Then tried it 12 times each way because of the "departed once more" line. Nothing happened. I gave up and looked up the answer. "Softest feather" refers to a "down", or soft fluff underneath the feathers of waterfowl (because everyone knows that, right?). "Corrected" refers to being RIGHT, "eleven times." "Departed" means you have LEFT, and 12 is "once more" than 11. Down, right x 11, left x 12. We have our final trophy! We've finally won! But what about that bright light that appeared in the Trophy Room that appeared after I had collected a certain amount of tropies? What's up with the weird room where symbols in the game's language would appear seemingly at random if I used the Holy Cross? (Why am I not wanting to call it a D-Pad?!) WILL THIS RIDE EVER END?!! I go to the translated manual for clues, as there is text written next to the illustration of the trophy room on page 54. It reads: "For Additional Support & Secrets 1. Find some rare golden statues. 2. Traverse the glow to visit 12 strange beings. 3. Un-sing to the the greatest song, the Song of the Golden Path, as seen from within" Excitedly, I went to that mysterious room as fast as I could make that little fox go. I stood there, brought up the golden path notes, and input the directions backwards. Nothing. It turns out "from within" also meant as seen from a mirror. I had the right idea, just the wrong angle. I reset the puzzle, looked up and put in the inverted directions, and nothing seemed to happen except for the fact that one of the glyph spaces is blank, with only 11 glyphs showing. Wondering if something is being spelled out, I look up the puzzle solution. I'm correct! It is a...website? https://doyoufeartheeyesofthefarshore.co/ Tunic has now become ̶K̶i̶n̶g̶s̶l̶e̶y̶'̶s̶ ̶A̶d̶v̶e̶n̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ Zelda/Dark Souls/The Witness/ARG. Clicking this link takes you to a creepy animated image of a smoky silhouette of what appears to be a squid monster with three eyes colored in the R/G/B color scheme we're used to. Harsh, grating sounds that sound almost like speech and ethereal whispers assaulted my ears. This was the squid-like being who's symbol I've seen everywhere in the game! Here I was stuck. This is where my journey with Tunic ended. I did learn that there was more languages in the music and sounds, and that running the website's sounds through a spectrogram results in the message "We are the Eyes of the Far Shore." I really did not expect so much to be wrapped inside such a colorful, cute and fluffy package. I apologize for the long post. I didn't realize how much I had to say about this game! If anyone's made it this far, I appreciate it! 😅

Holy m o l y I could unironically smell that game manual part o_o

I was waiting for this game to come out since like 2015. Finally glad to see it got released :D I was wondering if it was in development hell, or just stopped being worked on by the devs at one point. I was super hyped for it, so I'm really happy that it's great!

The flow and story of this game reminds me of my mother. My mother loved playing games. It doesn’t matter what kind of game it was. It could be a shooting game, it could be an old school side, scroll or or whatever, she loves games. And she would always sit with me and play. But as a depression, consumed her, she became more and more withdrawn and stopped wanting to play. Kind of like we see the fox at the end with the sword trying to kill us. I just like how the little fox find the missing pieces of the manual, and slowly reconstructs whatever that big fox was missing, and it gives her back her humanity, my mother was the same. Little by little, I was able to help her regain some of what I loved as a child about her, and even though her depression ended up, killing her, still, for a while, I guess I can say I had handed my mother the manual which, for me was sitting down with her not as an adult or a child, but just as myself and playing games, she had regain a lot of what I loved. That’s what this game makes me think of. A journey to recover my mother that I almost succeeded in, and just like this little fox, the first time I tried to save her, she lashed out at me. and just like this, a little fox, in order to understand what others had done to my mother to reduce her to this state, I had to go on a spiritual journey. I had to go down deep into myself and my memories and to the clues that she left me from verifications, and she would give of the past. Very vague details, that she would give of the things that she had gone through that inspired and grew the depression and her. Only when I brought that manual of Understanding together, did I see my mother, as she was before depression took her from me. As she really wants. And I found myself as I really was. Not as a young adult slowly, exploring life, But as a kid hanging out with my best friend, my mother

I feel like this is one of the only videos I watched that described how I felt and had the same experience I did with the dramatic paradigm shifts that affected me so heavily. The other videos alluded to how insane all these things were, and touched very briefly on the mere concept of the Golden Path, hell I didn't even realize the holy cross was the d pad, but they didn't explain as plainly as you did why this game is so amazing even though you'd understand that yourself perfectly if you stuck with the game long enough to discover this all for yourself which I mostly did. Excellent video, and Tunic is just a real good game, man

Played this on game pass, the game did a wonderful job of capturing that nostalgic feeling off looking at an "official" game guide to figure out stuff in the game before the internet really started to become more mainstream. I must applaud you for figuring out the golden puzzle yourself without help. Personally I would of never solved that myself alone. The game had a lot of "ah ha!" and "I understand this now" moments which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Also you missed one last secret even after the ending where you have to sing the golden path *IN REVERSE*, but I completely forgot where that was...

I love how when talking about the fire shrines you immediately went "Wait a minute, is this Dark Souls?!" cause around that same time I came to that realization as well and the timing was amazing xD

The translation aspect of the game was REALLY interesting. Interesting because of how… unnecessary it is. No core puzzle in the game requires translation, but can instead be intuited by visual cues alone. The Easter Eggs and deeper riddles (such as the trophies and glyph puzzle) do require translation, but they aren’t required for the story. So the translation is almost a third optional stage of the game. And I am immensely grateful it is OPTIONAL because solving a phonetic cypher is definitely not for everyone. Now I LOVE cyphers and have made several of my own (including on very similar to Trunic, which made it convenient for me to decipher), but some people don’t vibe that kind of puzzle. So I liked that the greatest puzzle of the game (the golden path) required no translation. It meant that almost any player could piece it together through the visual cues and get the immense satisfaction of doing it themselves.

I got the bad ending and just thought, cool, that was hard! I didn’t really want to search for the missing pages. I had NO idea how much crazier it got from there. I feel like I missed out, but at the same time I’m not sure I would have even solved most of the late-game stuff. What an insane game

3:10 So you said that manual felt like it was a real thing. It actually is! The developer actually made the manual and took photos of it for the game. So there IS a real game manual out there!