Tunic: The Manual Is the Game

In 1991 I could not play Monkey Island without the cardboard wheel. You’d line up the pirate’s hair with the pirate’s chin, read off a date, type it in, and the game would let you past. Lose the wheel and you owned a coaster. Every Amiga in the country had a shoebox of this stuff: code wheels, Lenslok, and the lookup tables that made you find page 14, line 3, word 6 in a manual you’d otherwise never open.

Publishers did that to stop people copying disks. What it actually did, by accident, was make the manual part of the machine. The game was on the disk and the game was also on the kitchen table, and you couldn’t run one without the other.

Tunic is what happens when someone takes that accident seriously.

What it is

Andrew Shouldice released Tunic in March 2022 after roughly seven years of work, published by Finji. It came to Xbox and PC first and reached PlayStation and Switch in September of the same year. It has spent the time since drifting through subscription services and sales, which is how most people meet it now — a small isometric action-adventure with a fox in a green tunic, obviously wearing the first Zelda’s clothes.

That’s the trap. It’s dressed as an homage and it’s actually an argument.

The manual

Scattered through the world are pages of an instruction booklet. Not lore fragments — an actual manual, laid out like something that fell out of a 1987 box: glossy illustrated spreads, a map, diagrams, a bestiary, arrows pointing at buttons. You collect the pages and you can open the booklet at any time, and the booklet is where the game keeps everything it hasn’t told you.

The manual is almost entirely written in a language you cannot read.

There’s an invented script — Trunic — running through every page, and the first time you open it your eye slides off it and lands on the pictures. Which is the point. You start reading the manual the way a nine-year-old reads a manual for a game they don’t own yet: guessing from diagrams, inferring from arrows, building a theory of what the game must contain out of pure iconography.

And then a page teaches you something real. There’s a spread that shows you how to dodge-roll, and until you find it, you do not dodge-roll — the button worked all along, and you simply did not know the verb existed. Later there’s a page that shows you a mechanic so fundamental that finding it retroactively re-explains everything you’ve been walking past for six hours.

This is progression made out of knowledge rather than items. The character never gets a new ability. You do.

Why it works

Metroidvanias gate you with objects, and objects are honest but inert: the game withholds the double jump, gives you the double jump, and the space of what you can do expands by exactly one predictable increment. You knew the double jump was coming. You’ve played this before.

Knowledge gating has a different shape. When Tunic hands you a page, your entire back catalogue of memories re-sorts at once. Every strange wall, every suspicious statue, every geometric thing you clocked as decoration — the page doesn’t open one door. It opens all the doors of that type, everywhere, retroactively, and the game didn’t have to build a single new room to do it.

That is enormously efficient design, and it’s also the reason the game can’t be patched into being easier. You cannot hint your way around it, because the thing being withheld isn’t in the save file.

The related trick is that Trunic is not decoration. It’s a real cipher — a consistent mapping to English phonemes, learnable, and people did learn it, sitting down with the pages and cracking the script like a philology homework. The manual is fully readable if you do the work. Shouldice built an entire functioning writing system and then made almost nobody need it, which is the single most confident act of restraint in the medium.

Chants of Sennaar went at the same problem from the front, making the decipherment the loop and giving you a notebook to be wrong in. Tunic buries it and lets you walk past. Both work. Sennaar is the better teacher; Tunic is the better ambush.

The manual as an artefact

Look at the pages themselves and you find the second layer of the joke. They’re faithful to a specific era of print — the slightly off registration, the airbrushed box-art idiom, the bilingual clutter, the way European manuals crammed six languages into a booklet none of us read. There are hand-scrawled annotations in the margins in biro, because of course there are; every used manual in every second-hand game I ever bought had somebody’s map of level three in the back.

Those annotations do heavy lifting. They’re the previous owner. Somebody was here, they figured some of this out, and they left you circled hints in a hand that isn’t the manual’s. It gives the game a social texture without a single line of multiplayer code — the same trick Souls messages pull, achieved with a pen.

None of this is nostalgia bait, and I’m allergic to nostalgia bait. The point isn’t that manuals were nice. The point is that manuals were a second information channel the game couldn’t see, and when that channel died — when everything moved in-game, into tutorials and tooltips and quest markers — designers lost the ability to withhold. If the game must teach you everything it can do, then everything it can do is a checklist. Tunic reopened the channel and immediately used it to lie to you.

Where it fights itself

The combat is the weak link and always was. It’s a slow, stamina-gated, roll-and-poke system with a shield, and it wants to be taken seriously enough to be tuned but loose enough to be forgiving, and it settles in an unhappy middle. The bosses have real teeth and the moment-to-moment fighting doesn’t have the precision to make that teeth-baring feel fair. There’s an option to switch off damage entirely, and I don’t think it’s a defeat to use it; the game’s actual content is above the neck.

The isometric camera is the other tax. Tunic hides things behind geometry deliberately — an entire class of secret depends on a path being invisible from your fixed angle — and this is genuinely clever the first six times. After that it’s a game where you occasionally walk into walls hoping. Depth ambiguity as a puzzle mechanic has a low ceiling, and the game finds it.

And the mid-game asks you to do a lot of running. The world folds beautifully and the shortcuts open, and there’s still a stretch around the halfway mark where you’re crossing three biomes because a page told you something and the thing it told you about is a long way away.

The verdict

Tunic is a game about the pleasure of not being told, and it holds a position almost nothing else in the medium is willing to hold: that the player is capable of figuring it out and will enjoy the figuring more than the finding. It spends its first hours letting you believe it’s a small polite Zelda tribute so that the betrayal has somewhere to stand.

Play it anywhere — it’s on everything now, and it’s light enough to run on a toaster. Play it with a notebook and a pen, actually, and be ready to be embarrassed by how long it takes you to notice you’re allowed to draw things.

The pairing I’d suggest is Return of the Obra Dinn, which runs the other great knowledge-progression system of the era, and Inscryption if what you liked was being lied to about what kind of game you’d bought.

Spoilers below

The Holy Cross is the whole thesis, and it’s the best thing I’ve seen a game do with an input.

There is no new item. There’s a sequence of directional presses, and the manual has been showing you where to use it the entire time — hidden in the page borders, in the decorative frames, in the fold. The instruction was in your hands from the first page you picked up. You looked at it a hundred times. It was printed on the paper.

And so the game’s real final ability is literacy. Once you see the border code, you go back through every page you’ve collected and read the game’s own documentation as a walkthrough, which is precisely the ritual the code wheel and the lookup table trained a generation to perform — go to the manual, find the page, read off the answer, come back. Shouldice took the most hated piece of 1980s anti-piracy friction and rebuilt it as the reward.

The two endings sharpen it. You can beat the Heir with a sword, which is the answer the game’s combat has been training, and it’s the lesser ending. Or you can gather the pages, understand what the fox has been doing to the previous heirs, and end it another way entirely — an ending available only to a player who read the paperwork. One route is reflexes. The other is attention. The game knows exactly which one it thinks is worth more, and it never once says so out loud.