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Tunic is a little fox dressed in green, and the game doesn't tell us its name. Near the place where the little fox wakes up is a cave with torches and mailbox signs next to it, and the player should not miss it. Weapons (a stick) are provided inside the cave, and we bring them because solo adventures are often fraught with danger. No one told us exactly what to do, we just followed our instincts and knew that we would eventually find a sword or collect a hidden blood item.
Whether it's out of experience or cultural influences, we're all aware of how to play these kinds of games. From the game's pre-title (Secret Legend), the mechanics, to its style, we can see that it unabashedly conveys the influence of the Zelda series on itself.
Tunic slightly changed the top-down perspective to make the game look more three-dimensional, we will collect some mysterious items in this world to open up the way forward, if we encounter a small setback, just use the right items to move forward smoothly, boss battles, dungeon exploration is the same.
While the game's props aren't very eye-catching, Tunic does give them a special charm, turning them into surprises by incorporating familiar elements. The game doesn't even have the character of the cave man of Zelda, deliberately designing some content to be obscure, such as the text content is mainly a bunch of artificial characters. You can recall The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Staff, where characters communicate in ancient languages you don't understand, which is what Tunic takes most of the time.
When you enter a new area, menus, signposts, and text that pop up on the screen are only partially translated at most. When you pick up that stick in the cave, you don't know what's written on it except "yes" and "no." But you can guess what happens after you choose Yes and how the game works, and it should be that it wants you to pick up the item.
Manual collection
Soon after, you'll open a treasure chest and get a small sculpture of a fox's head that pops up a menu with incomprehensible words written on it. Are they the names of the items? Or the generic "You got an item!" Something like that? We don't know anything about that. In addition to the general experiment, we can also rely on the game experience and context clues to speculate, such as by equipping the fox sculpture to figure out its actual use, and then click the corresponding button to use its function. Alternatively, we can wait until the little fox gets the game's manual (one of the collectible elements).
The manual collection is not in order, and the text on it is also confusing, but it is accompanied by exquisite illustrations in the ancient style, reminiscent of the time when I opened the game manual on the way home with great anticipation. By collecting and flipping through them, you can rely on these manuals to drive your progress, for example, the owner will leave some graffiti notes before the manuals, introducing you to new skills, map features, and useful suggestions.
However, the design of the manual is not complete, after all, you can't force the player to read the manual, and there is no guarantee that they will take the manual seriously from the beginning. Many of these games I didn't know how to play at first, but as the game became more complex, the manual content gradually became part of the game. More elaborate drawings reduce the need for additional illustrations and stimulate your imagination to think about what each diagram corresponds to.
Nostalgic games often design exhaustive manuals, which is clearly one of the ways to show nostalgia. However, this type of game itself is also very complex, and it is more or less necessary to bring a detailed PDF document. Tunic's guidelines are designed to collect elements and respond to players' neglect of the manual in a flexible way, turning it into a shiny reward rather than a homework that must be done before starting the game.
By providing players with a disorderly manual to collect this design, the game better shows its charm, which is how Tunic was designed. You should have read the game manual well, but lacked patience, and these difficult texts make you feel more like a child, can't understand it, but doesn't want to ask people. Or maybe you feel like you're staring at a foreign language and can only read a few words, and Tunic simulates a variety of situations we might encounter before design specifications and solutions came along. Most of the new skills in the game are actions that players can perform from the beginning, and if you read the manual from head to toe, you will theoretically know how to do it.
Secret legends
However, there is also a risk in repeating this design in the game, as it can easily cause frustration among players. Normally, this is not part of exploratory design, and it stands to reason that you should wait until the game is localized so that you can read the text smoothly. Sometimes, you should have noticed an icon, but you ignored it.
Whenever I leveled, I wondered if I was missing any details or if there might be a problem with the game itself (I still remember the painful experience of playing Superman 64). I'll try again, after all, these are the only resources I have on hand, and I may have overlooked some details before. I remembered an "hard play" experience when I was a child, and because there was no pressure on my work and time, I spent a lot of time carefully examining every clue and trying all kinds of strange methods patiently.
Cleverly designed, Tunic incorporates many of the exploration mechanics into the gameplay itself. The world is full of hidden treasure chests, as well as paths obscured by the environment, and if you're stuck somewhere, you might wander around aimlessly.
The process of exploration and discovery can be quite enlightening, such as when you discover a new shortcut or a new area, or suddenly a new possibility flashes in your head, so you try to press a random key combination to try out a new ability. The game seems to be powered by props, but it's actually quite free, somewhat similar to the design of Star Quest, which limits your activities as you haven't mastered your existing skills yet. Once you know enough about Tunic, you can go back in time and take a completely different route.
I'm actually hesitant to use the word "nostalgia" because many of the "nostalgic" products don't live up to their name. This kind of work often makes a lot of references, hoping that the feelings contained in it will allow players to sort out the information through appropriate image symbols. Tunic works so well because it's built on a style we're familiar with, but its core isn't in the Zelda-like style, it's about the way it designs mysteries and explorations.
Tunic reinvents a new way of thinking that has become more precious since we grew up, but the game does a little bit by embracing and fusing what we didn't understand in the past but we know today, and it gives those elements a new lease of life in our eyes.
Translation: Wang Yi
Edit: Zoe