Tunic, and the Engagement of Story and Player

Tunic is an action-adventure game by Andre Shouldice. Released in March of 2022, Tunic presents an almost top-down view of a cute fox running around a game world. The game draws direct inspiration from the Legend of Zelda series in how the game’s narrative and game is structured with the addition of Souls-like elements and mechanics. The game relies on the player’s exploration and experiences in order to tell the story of the game. The tutorial, mechanics and other aspects of the game are hidden from the player, and relies on the player’s interaction with the game in order to be understood and experienced.

Today, I want talk about Tunic’s story, how it’s experienced and communicated to and by the player. I think Tunic is a really interesting example of how stories can be told in video games, and how they can intersect with notions and mechanics of gameplay. And the greatest part of this is the role of cyclical time.

So, I’m gonna preface this essay by saying that if you want to play Tunic and have the best experience of it, try to not watch anything or read much about it before you play. Just dive right in and love it with all of your foxy little heart.

In a previous video, I talked about how video game narratives can be understood as being on a graph-like spectrum of explicit and implicit story: explicit story being the written narrative, and implicit story being the experienced narrative. I think this may be a good place to start for our conversation today, because I want to focus on the story of Tunic, and how it relates to some conceptions and ideas that we’ve already gone over. Knowing exactly how the story is both communicated and felt by the player is really important.

Tunic, I think, would be placed somewhere in the quadrant of low explicit narrative and high implicit. This means that Tunic’s story is focused primarily on gameplay, exploration and discovery based around the player experience, and very little is presented as dialogue or written narratives in the form of cutscenes. In fact, there’s really no dialogue at all, and all the writing is in the form of strange symbols which, which technically could be translated by the player, but is mostly esoteric and incalculable.

In Tunic, there are two simultaneous and interconnected stories happening at the same time: one of the gamer and one of the in-game story. One is implicit, the other explicit. You need the first to fully complete and experience the second.

Let’s talk about the story of the player first. This story is primarily focused around the gamebook. In Tunic, the player finds pieces of paper, and each collection adds another page to the game’s gamebook. The book holds the appearance of an old NES-style rulebook, with pages on what controls do, tips on combat and exploration, and maps of different areas.

There are also annotations in the gamebook. These notes are sometimes in the same obscured language of the signs and other markings of the game. Sometimes they’re in English. Sometimes they’re in drawings and markings. Subtle arrows, or question marks, or other marks and notations on maps or information pages. Even other marks are on the page, like coffee stains. The gamebook echoes the experience of playing games with siblings or relatives, of discovering a game and exploring a game with a helpful guidance.

Tunic provides the player with the experience of playing a game through an engagement with past knowledge even when the game is fresh and new. But the knowledge is only as esoteric and difficult to read as you make it, and those who seek out the knowledge will be happily rewarded. The guidance of the gamebook also provides the player with a greater sense of nostalgia, particularly for those players who started playing video games in the times of NES guidebooks. The very first Zelda game, for example, had guidebook that provided information on story, items, and locations which helped to provide the player with context to the game. While some players wrote all over the guidebook, some may not have at all.

Tunic draws inspiration from two primary game series: Zelda and Dark Souls. Zelda clearly draws on cyclical time in it’s mythology and storytelling, as we’ve already talked about it before. In our previous video, I talked about some traditional myths’ description and connection to cyclical time, and how it’s then presented in the Zelda games. But Dark Souls also tells its story through cyclical notions of time, and like Tunic, Dark Soul’s storytelling itself is very reliant on the player engagement with world in order to shine. Dark Souls and Zelda, despite both utilizing notions of cyclical time in their narratives, they both approach it two very different ways.

Dark Souls’ cyclical nature of time is more derivative of a Buddhist worldview and notion of time. In Dark Souls, the cycle is strained and its continued presence is what is destroying the world. The goal of Dark Souls is to break the cycle. This echoes Buddhist conceptions of cyclical time and the continual creation and recreation, but with the ultimate goal of breaking this continuous cycle.

In contrast, Zelda’s games insist the player sinks into the cycle. Each game replays the same story with slight variations, and the goal is to simply play it out. Zelda sees cyclical time is kinder than the Souls timeframe, because while it traps some individuals, the cycle is seen as somehow necessary to the world, to always have someone present to battle the evil and keep the world at peace. In Dark Souls, there is no peace because of the cycle – the cycle causes pain and the only way to heal that pain is through breaking the cycle.

Tunic echoes the Dark Soul’s conception of cyclical time. The in-game narrative slowly reveals itself to the player as the character being trapped in an ever-present cycle. The small fox is always tied to fighting the heir, and upon success they take the place of the heir, and the cycle begins again. Tunic’s good ending is the breaking of the cycle, where the fox does not take the heir’s position, and the bad ending is the continuation.

Despite drawing on the clear Buddhist backing Dark Souls, Tunic doesn’t seem to connect as much to Buddhism as it does Dark Souls. The visual and some gameplay elements that connect to Zelda ends up lightening the often more negative views of cyclical time that marks the world in Dark Souls. While Tunic is occasionally marked with some sombre imagery and tonal shifts to much more grim and hopeless areas, it is, on a whole, a bit lighter than Dark Souls. But these elements also make it far darker than Zelda.

So the first narrative of the game is the story that’s written – the cyclical nature of the fox’s life which is constantly born to fight the one who came before. It’s the story in the world, the one that’s described in the game booklet, and the one that the player is piecing together has their character is as well.

The second narrative is the story of the player, one played out through the experience of exploring the world but also in discovering the various pages of the gamebook. The player’s story is unique to each player, constantly shifting and altering depending on who they are and when in their life they’re playing it. But this story is mostly directed through the discovering, reading, and engagement with the gamebook.

This isn’t to say that Tunic is the only game that has a story that’s basically the experience of the player. In that previous video about types of mythology in video games, one of those was implicit mythology – or the story that happens when an individual experiences a narrative. But the narrative here in Tunic is vaguely different because the use of the game-booklet directly engages with this part of the narrative in a way that isn’t always present. While some games have the player experience be only present due to the nature of the medium, Tunic understands this aspect as present, and actively engages with it and brings it more directly present into the experience of the game.

In other words, the game book makes the story of the protagonist the same as the story of the player. The way the protagonist breaks the cycle of rebirths and fights is through knowledge, the same exact knowledge that the player is slowly piecing together for themselves as well. It’s this knowledge that the player uses to understand the game, the experience, and even their own previous experiences with video games.

Tunic works to blur the boundaries between the player and the game. Despite the fact that I separated out these two narratives, they need to be present together to have the successful game narrative that Tunic has. For players to feel firmly invested in the narrative, the have become part of the narrative. Their exploration leads to more information, which then ultimately allows our fox to complete their quest. Tunic works to actively blur the boundaries between player and game. These boundaries are already fairly blurred anyway due to the nature of the video game medium, but Tunic takes it one step further. By drawing on our nostalgia, our experiences of relying on our communities when we play games, exploring the relationship between siblings or parents or friends when we play games, and the urge we have for completion and the notations we naturally make when doing that. These are rewarded not only with in game items, but with a better relationship with the game itself, and a result that illustrates what it is that we’ve learned.

Tunic therefore uses these experiences and connections to game, ties it directly to ourselves and our nostalgia, and reinforces it with conceptions of cyclical time and the continued idea of replay and re-engagement. I think the way Tunic tells its story is absolutely fascinating, and a lot of games can really learn how Tunic relied on the player’s relationship to game to build an impactful narrative, demonstrating directly how players impact the games they’re playing, but how, in turn, games impact us as players.