Issue 370

Dialogue

Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to Edge.

For fox sake

Game manuals were once an art form. Unique illustrations, premises and character bios, tips and tricks for gameplay – these have been relegated to game guides or spread across various in-game menus today. I lament how they’ve disappeared over time and the loss of the special relationship they can have with their games. I think the love I have for them has been gently sparked with the digitisation and integration of physical media within games to help solve puzzles (Nathan Drake’s journal in Uncharted 4) or navigate worlds (Henry’s map in Firewatch). Tunic is the latest to incorporate this idea but it does so with a game manual. And it’s not just for flavour; it’s a core part of the experience.

Tunic has no tutorial. The controls are only conveyed via pages found throughout the game world, which unveil variations or nuances in mechanics that are meant to be discovered later to progress. There are enemy illustrations and descriptions, but most of the narrative context is hidden behind a fictional language, so players are made to draw conclusions from images, symbolisms, and bits of English. There’s even messy marginalia on maps and near item pictures that not only offer hints to hidden locations, but also clues for secret puzzles and mechanics that are too good and too deep to spoil.