Tunic Has Mysteries (and Chores)
Some secrets are more secret than others
I'm so used to indie games mimicking the surface level details of their inspiration without offering anything beyond that, that when I first saw Tunic, I wrote it off. Yeah, it's like Zelda, I get it. I'm over the low-poly ambient Fez aesthetic. At this point, I'm even over 2D Zelda—when I tried replaying Oracle of Ages a few months ago, it just felt like a weird generic ROM hack of Link's Awakening.
In my defense, Tunic wears this mask of unoriginality intentionally. The first 45 minutes of the game are cut-and-dry: you fight slimes in a forest with your sword.
And then you start collecting the manual pages. You get a map with weird symbols on it. You start collecting items, not a bow and arrows, but a sci-fi laser rod and a hot pepper. You find out about the game's subsystems that have been lying under the surface all along. You can't pattern match any of this, so you rely on the manual to explain everything, like you haven't had to do since Zelda II, and just like back then, you can't read any of it.
Tunic is a game entirely focused around the type of mystery that I'm obsessed with. It's hard to even put into words what Tunic is doing; it's just pure rock. It's one of the best games I've ever played.
That being said, my last few hours with the game were a bit tiresome. Tunic starts with a bang and then slowly fizzles out as you mine it for its final secrets. But it's not uniquely bad at this—lately, I’ve found that most games have forgotten how to pull off a satisfying climax. This has me thinking about the importance of unboarding.
Every developer knows how important onboarding is. Smoothly introduce the player to your game and get to the simplest form of action as quickly as possible. But in the era of mega-games that want to eat up as much of your time as possible, not nearly as much thought seems to be put into the game's ending as its beginning.
Think about the final sequences in Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario World. What kind of psychopath is going to immediately turn the game back on and keep playing after hitting those ending screens?
Yet I find myself doing this all the time with modern games. The endings are less satisfying (if you even get the TRUE ending on your first playthrough), the credits sequences are embarrassingly less impactful than their Super Nintendo counterparts (they aren’t even timed to music anymore!), and there's a whole platter of Post-Game Content™ to see. The developers want you to keep playing forever.
Setting aside the artistic aspect of how to direct a climax, there's a game design issue that exacerbates this. That issue is quantification:
"There are plenty of secrets in the best games, this theory goes, so why don't we quantify them? Why don't we mark them with a little item that you carry around with you as proof of your find? Indeed, many genres are built on quantifying the unquantifiable, RPGs being the prime example. Players appreciate explicit rules, and like knowing exactly how their decisions are going to affect the game world.
The problem is one of subtlety. Mario's many secrets work, in part, because they're secret -- every one's a surprise, with little to no indication that it's there. Players stumbling across it wonder how many other secrets there could be, and just how big this game is."
What Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario World all have in common in addition to their incredible endings is that they also contain a ton of genuinely secret secrets. This isn't a coincidence. It's hard to finish a game and feel full from it when it can't help asking you if you saw the moonwalking bear.
Telling the player that there's a specific number of secrets creates a sense of compulsion in them that gets them to keep playing even after they naturally feel they've explored the game world to their heart's content. Worse, each of these secrets takes progressively longer to find as they clear the map.
My first twelve hours with Tunic were a magical exploration through a new world that had mystery around every corner. My last five hours were a series of compulsive sweeps over that world looking for minor details I'd missed in pursuit of getting the best ending. Everyone I know who found all of Tunic's fairies and trophies (the game's quantified endgame collectibles) seems to have had a kind of miserable time of it.
What's especially tragic about this is that Tunic does contain some extremely obscure secrets that it doesn't expect players to ever find! Its audio designer has an incredible thread detailing how they hid some of these secrets, in which he uses the phrase "content for no one." I adore this.
It's a shame that the developers didn't have the confidence to treat all of their hidden content in this way. If Tunic was a bit shorter and denser in its content distribution, people would be more excited to replay it, and during their replay, would encounter those secrets naturally with their endgame knowledge. If the secrets aren't quantified, there's way less temptation (and ability) to spoil them for yourself. This is how you create a real masterpiece that will have depth and replayability for decades!
Every time I play Ocarina of Time, I discover more. My second playthrough as a kid, aided by the strategy guide and a newfound ability to read, pointed me towards the game's larger side quests. Years later, upon getting on the internet and discovering GameFAQs, I had my mind blown by all the small Easter eggs I’d never encountered. When I replayed the game for the first time as an adult, I picked up on some of its more nuanced story themes, and now that people have decompiled the game's code, I can explore its world on a deeper level still.
At its best, Tunic is maybe the only game I've ever played to absolutely nail this exact feeling in so many very specific ways. For the most part, Tunic gets it.
Hopefully, game developers begin to understand the ways that secrets make Tunic great and the ways that "secrets" hold Tunic back, and use that knowledge to create games that are even more deliciously mysterious.