Xbox Indie Spotlight: Tunic

By Heidi Nicholas,

Tunic is one of those upcoming indie gems that only looks more gorgeous the more we see of it, so we thought it high time we sat down and chatted all things Tunic with creator Andrew Shouldice, who was kind enough to answer our questions.

What is Tunic?

Tunic is an action-adventure game about a small fox in a big world of secrets. Exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving are key elements — Tunic almost seems to breathe with that sense of adventure and discovery.

When does Tunic launch?

We don’t yet have a launch date for Tunic, but we’ll be sure to update here when we find out!

What’s it about?

The player’s experience and sense of Tunic’s story seems to be of paramount importance. “The story of the game,” Shouldice begins, “is that you are a little fox, and you wake up on a beach and you have nothing at all, and you go for a little walk, and you find a cave, and in the cave you find a stick, and then you find a mysterious golden door — and maybe when you touch it, you get a vision of something strange on the other side of it, and soon you find a sheet of paper on the ground that is a page of an instruction manual and on it, it seems to imply that you need to go do these great tasks to find some ancient treasure. That’s sort of the experience of the person playing the game,” Shouldice continues, “and that is sort of the story of the game ideally; the arc that the player experiences as they go through it is truly their story, they’re the one that is discovering these things. We want to keep the experience of the player character as close to that of the player themselves. The story of the game is you going on an adventure and not really knowing what to expect… really the experience of playing the game is the story that you participate in telling yourself.” Tunic’s demo does indeed have that irresistible sense of starting from scratch in a world you don’t completely understand. Exploration seemed to be key in deepening our understanding of Tunic’s mysterious world — but, Shouldice continues, “That’s not to say that there isn’t a story happening in the background, or story happening in the past — maybe there is a reason why this door is closed, and maybe there is a reason why this place is in ruins, but that’s the sort of thing for players to uncover as they play.”

If you tried the demo, you might have come across a few pages written in a mysterious and inscrutable language. It’s an interesting addition to the game, to have key information written in this strange unknown language, and Shouldice says it plays into Tunic’s themes of discovery and secrets. “Really from the very beginning, this game has been about trying to make something that feels mysterious,” he explains. “Not just in so far as there is a mystery in it, but that the player comes into it not really knowing what to expect; feeling like they’re a stranger in a strange land, feeling like they’re in a place where they don’t belong. Imagine… I don’t have any older siblings, but maybe you do; you’re sneaking into your older sibling’s room, and you find a video game that you’re not supposed to play, plugged in, and you’re loading somebody else’s saved game, and you’re not really sure what’s going on, and you can’t read any of the text, maybe because it’s in another language, or you just don’t know the words… it’s just like going into a place and being like, ‘this clearly means something, I don’t know what,’” Shouldice continues, “and that genuine feeling of mystery, of not understanding what’s going on, is something that we wanted to capture from the very beginning, and it seemed natural to include language that did that, both making you feel like, ‘oh this place is not meant for me,’ and also, a way to imply some secrets.”

Our character is that tiny little fox, which just so happens to be pretty darn adorable. “It being adorable was not a small consideration,” Shouldice jokes, “but mostly it was, I wanted to make a game where you are a character going on an adventure, and it was mostly about the world, as opposed to the story of a particular person… so the idea that anybody could pick this up and be like, ‘ok, I’m the fox,’ was sort of important... It worked out nicely; people seem to really like foxes... and foxes get up to mischief, which is another thing that is core to the game, the feeling of sneaking into places where you don’t belong.”

What’s the Tunic gameplay like?

This decision of a fox as our protagonist also had some combat considerations, Shouldice added, “like the fact that the fox has a big head that’s basically an arrow and a fluffy tail… orientation during combat, where you’re facing and targeting and stuff becomes a little bit more obvious than if it were just a non-arrow shaped head.” Tunic’s combat came as something of a surprise when we tried its demo, as despite its wholesome, fantastical appearance, it counts Bloodborne and Dark Souls as some of its influences. “It’s not 1:1 modelled after any of those things,” Shouldice clarifies, “but one of the things I like about combat in those games is not necessarily that it’s brutally hard, and ‘you’ve got to be a master gamer’ — that’s not what this game is about; it’s not about grinding people into paste because of its difficulty, it’s about discovery.” He continues, adding, “so, you might find a monster and think… ‘this thing is really scary, it’s spinning around and hitting me and I can’t do anything, I guess I’m not meant to be here’ — but maybe if you flip through your manual, and you’re like, ‘there’s a shield, I didn’t get the shield; if I get the shield, I can block those, and progress further.’ Or maybe you flip through the manual and see, ‘wait a second, what does this mean, wait, ok, let me experiment; oh, I can do a parry?’ These are mechanical secrets in the game that exist as part of the world from the very beginning, but, you need to get the right equipment and then learn how to do it.”

“If combat itself is a matter of discovery," Shouldice concludes, "then what you get with that is, pulling people along into mastery... what does it feel like intuitively in your hands — like dodging out of an attack at just the right time and being able to retaliate, that feels good, so helping people to get to that point of skill by giving them new tools and secrets and new obstacles to overcome is sort of the goal.”

Puzzle-solving will be a big part of Tunic. Shouldice has previously mentioned that Tunic’s puzzles will take a different form than the more implausible puzzle rooms. “I like a good Zelda puzzle, like you walk into a room and you’re like, ‘ok, I’ve got a task to do and I can do it.’ But sometimes it does feel a little bit like homework,” Shouldice explains, “like, you’re an adventurer and you’ve found a sword and you’re going into a dungeon, and there’s a monster there and they’ve got all the minions and you’ve got to use all your courage and ingenuity to do it — but here’s a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes it’s handled nicely,” he continues, “like Breath of the Wild has a framing device for those things, it’s like, ‘hey, hero, we know you’re doing an adventure, we made you some puzzles to prove that you are worthy.’ These are constructed as puzzles, so they’re ridiculous, like rolling boulders, and the things that feel like puzzles are actually puzzles, and that diegetic explanation is like, ‘ok, that makes sense.’ And it sort of alludes to the idea that this is a video game.

But the idea that it’s like, the chest with 100 gold pieces, you got to light all the torches and that’s where our secret relic is hidden, I don’t know… sometimes it’s really fun, but oftentimes it breaks things up in a weird way... my favourite puzzles are the ones that are less, 'here is a task to do'; I vastly prefer puzzles that are like, 'here’s a detail, here’s a truth about the world that you did not know,' and that changes the context of your movement through that world and your understanding of it. Who knows if people are going to get that, specifically from this game, from Tunic, but that’s where I land.”

What’s the world like?

When exploration and discovery are as integral to a game as they are to Tunic, the game’s world is just as important. “It is sort of inspired by the environments I’m familiar with,” begins Shouldice, “so the idea of going on an adventure in the woods, or finding a clearing and running across it; things that I hold near and dear to my heart as childhood memories. Don’t be surprised if you find some spooky forests, or some mist-filled graveyards,” he continues, “and there are some more unusual things as well that we haven’t yet talked about, but the standard fare of spooky caves and stuff like that… that’s the backbone. Exploring and discovery is about the world, right? So that was a really important part of trying to have not only a feeling of discovery and wonder and wanting to see what’s around the next corner, but also the gentlest touches of, ‘what is this for? What is this all about? Someone put this here for a reason, but I don’t know why yet, maybe I never will, maybe I will.’”

And what is Shouldice most looking forward to players finding out or discovering? “There are definitely some things that I am excited to find out if people… does this land, did people get it, did they find it, but those are secret. There is a secret door in the ruins of a town behind a tree that has a really cool thing in it,” he continues, “but I can’t say what it is… speaking very broadly and not giving away particular secrets, I think the thing I’m excited for and nervous about, because, is it going to land? Who knows, but I’m excited to watch people on their journeys of discovery and see if it fills them with that sort of joy of uncovering secrets.”

The Discord community is really great… being able to see people genuinely have a good time with a thing that you made, it’s heartwarming. I hope that that happens, and if it does, I’m going to treasure it.” Shouldice points to the demo as an example. “There’s a bunch of hidden secrets and stuff, and one of the things we’re always worried about is, is someone going to spoil it? Is someone going to come in and just be like, ‘here’s a list of where you find all the secrets,’ but that’s not what happens. The people come together and someone’s like, ‘oh I’m really stuck, I can’t get to this chest,’ and people write their own little riddles to be like, ‘have you tried this...’ so they’re doing it, they’re making their own secrets in the game to help other people, and that is a strong indication to me that people get it, and that gives me hope for what it’s going to be like when we launch this thing.”

Any news on Tunic achievements?

We don’t yet have the Tunic achievements, but Shouldice did give us a few hints as to his thoughts about achievements themselves. “This is the first game that I have written achievements for,” Shouldice begins. “That process is interesting; on one side it’s a technical requirement of the platforms, and there are certain things that are like, oh we should probably have something early on like, ‘here’s a treat, you found a stick, congratulations, here’s an achievement’... It’s a way of… your progress, of understanding what you’ve done and what your friends have not.” Shouldice says that he “vastly prefers” achievements that are “genuinely hidden,” and adds, “we’ve had some fun with that. So there’s sort of a split, there are some achievements that are like ‘you did the thing, congratulations, you progressed, you found a new area, or you found the important thing’… but then there are other ones like you noticed something in the environment, or maybe you’re flipping through the manual and you found like, ‘wait, there’s something fishy about that’, and you explore it, you experimented a little bit and you found out something weird and new about the world, or you did an unusual thing and got a little prize for it. Those are the ones I’m more interested in.” Given Tunic’s focus on the hidden and the secretive, it sounds as though our little fox will need to be an intrepid explorer to hunt all the game’s achievements.

“Achievements in particular — this is getting sort of philosophical,” Shouldice continues, “achievements are interesting because they are presented to you in a context that is one step removed from the video game. You know, I’m playing the video game, I’m immersed in this world — it has UI, but generally speaking those things sort of match — and then I do something and the video game, the operating system, comes in and says, ‘I saw what you did there, good job’... that is a good spot where you can do your weird arbitrary puzzle stuff, that’s a good spot for like, ‘hey, wait a second, we’ve noticed that you’ve played this game enough, you know it’s a video game, we know it’s a video game, have you tried doing this? No? Ok, well I won’t say anything,’ but if they go on to do that, that’s the wink and nod from the designer… I like that, that metatextual layer removed is sort of an interesting way of handling that.”

What do you think? Has Tunic got you ready to go adventuring? Let us know in the comments!

More Tunic stories:

Interview Xbox One

Written by Heidi Nicholas

Heidi tends to lean towards indie games, RPGs, and open-world games on Xbox, and when not playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, happily installs every new wholesome game that appears on Xbox Game Pass, before diving back into favorites like The Witcher 3. She's looking forward to Age of Mythology Retold, Everwild, Fable, and Avowed on the Xbox horizon. Heidi graduated with an MA in English Literature before joining the TrueAchievements team.