Tunic is the most curious game included in this sale. I guess it is pretty open-ended, though I never stopped to think about whether it was so tightly designed that I considered it a true open-world game or not. Regardless, Tunic is worth the price of entry because not only is it a great game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda, but it is also one of gaming’s best mystery games. You see, Tunic is a game with some dense layers. On its face, it’s a cute, voxel-style mashup of Zelda’s exploration and Dark Souls’ difficulty, but there’s so much more happening just beneath the surface of the game’s driving action. Mechanics, as well as the nuances of its curious world, are conveyed via torn-up manual pages that can be discovered through exploration, except it’s all in a language that looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It can be translated, though, and deciphering it helps unlock so many of the tucked-away secrets within Tunic, which transforms the experience into something else entirely. Would you believe me if I said that wasn’t even Tunic’s only language that can be found and translated?
Tunic is like a Russian nesting doll of game experiences, and cracking one layer of it just to find another is a bewitchingly good time. I’ve actually not played a game quite like it, and to give away any more would be to rob you of a singular experience. Grab Tunic on Game Pass or while it’s $15 on Xbox right now.