Remember manuals? They were nice, huh? Where you'd buy a brand new game with your hard earned cash and on the trip home, before you even booted up the game for the first time, the instruction manual would be there. Offering you a wealth of information about the game, ranging from ostensibly useless to explanations of crucial mechanics, maybe even some stuff that's not in the game itself!

See, the thing about manuals is - and this isn't a criticism of people who love them a whole bunch, it's totally understandable, nor the concept themselves - they do *kinda* spoil the experience in a way. Not in a way that totally ruins the experience, that would be an absurd suggestion; but, you could argue, a manual written in a certain way with certain content can rob the player of the *discovery* that comes with the experience of playing the game. They almost create a difficult relationship between the game designer and the player - the designer can spend all this effort making sure the mechanics are the game are explained via their gameplay, but the player might just be reading the manual to get the full understanding themselves, so it's a bit of a weird stand-off.

TUNIC is a game which clearly draws a lot of its design from the sheer love of instruction manuals, but transforms that love into one of the freshest and most interesting mechanics I've seen in a game in years. Quick explainer, for the uninitiated: TUNICs manual is an in-game encyclopedia which is slowly put together over the course of the game by collecting its pages. You can think of it like, say, the collectible diaries in Bayonetta, but rather than offering supplemental information which leans harder on narrative than gameplay, TUNICs collectible pages *are* the games manual!

There's an interesting dynamic at play, thanks to this set-up: obviously, a game designer always has control over how and when you collect new items, learn new abilities, encounter new enemies, and even the pace and order of tutorials given to the player, if any. The game designer reaching past the player character to speak directly to you, the player, and explain mechanics, is nothing new, but there's something unique and charming about the implementation in TUNIC and how it ties into your experience of the game. Over the course of your first play-through, your understanding of the game will develop through a tandem of your own exploration and experimentation, and gentle nudges along by the manual, written in a foreign language but for the odd keyword, intended to use your existing understanding of "how a video game works" to lead you to conclusions about how *this* one works.

Even with this arrangement - being given a literal handbook to reference within the game at your command - it's a game of real depth, which only opens up more and more with enticing secrets and insisting nudges. You might be forgiven, if this is the only review you read, for thinking TUNIC is just a game about walking around and finding stuff: it *does* have combat, multiple weapons, spells, boss fights, everything you expect from a game wearing it's Legend of Zelda influence on its sleeve so proudly, but honestly, it's probably the least interesting part of the entire experience for me. Not that this makes me knock any points off of it, and really, it's probably essential - what good are swords and spells without a plethora of beasties to use them against? - it's just that, well, the game features an entire suite of accessibility features intending to make combat *less* of a thing, and I think that was a really wise decision. It makes a lot of sense to use combat as the bone, but this is a game with some really impressive meat on it.

Remember manuals? They were nice, huh? Where you'd buy a brand new game with your hard earned cash and on the trip home, before you even booted up the game for the first time, the instruction manual would be there. Offering you a wealth of information about the game, ranging from ostensibly useless to explanations of crucial mechanics, maybe even some stuff that's not in the game itself! See, the thing about manuals is - and this isn't a criticism of people who love them a whole bunch, it's totally understandable, nor the concept themselves - they do *kinda* spoil the experience in a way. Not in a way that totally ruins the experience, that would be an absurd suggestion; but, you could argue, a manual written in a certain way with certain content can rob the player of the *discovery* that comes with the experience of playing the game. They almost create a difficult relationship between the game designer and the player - the designer can spend all this effort making sure the mechanics are the game are explained via their gameplay, but the player might just be reading the manual to get the full understanding themselves, so it's a bit of a weird stand-off. TUNIC is a game which clearly draws a lot of its design from the sheer love of instruction manuals, but transforms that love into one of the freshest and most interesting mechanics I've seen in a game in years. Quick explainer, for the uninitiated: TUNICs manual is an in-game encyclopedia which is slowly put together over the course of the game by collecting its pages. You can think of it like, say, the collectible diaries in Bayonetta, but rather than offering supplemental information which leans harder on narrative than gameplay, TUNICs collectible pages *are* the games manual! There's an interesting dynamic at play, thanks to this set-up: obviously, a game designer always has control over how and when you collect new items, learn new abilities, encounter new enemies, and even the pace and order of tutorials given to the player, if any. The game designer reaching past the player character to speak directly to you, the player, and explain mechanics, is nothing new, but there's something unique and charming about the implementation in TUNIC and how it ties into your experience of the game. Over the course of your first play-through, your understanding of the game will develop through a tandem of your own exploration and experimentation, and gentle nudges along by the manual, written in a foreign language but for the odd keyword, intended to use your existing understanding of "how a video game works" to lead you to conclusions about how *this* one works. Even with this arrangement - being given a literal handbook to reference within the game at your command - it's a game of real depth, which only opens up more and more with enticing secrets and insisting nudges. You might be forgiven, if this is the only review you read, for thinking TUNIC is just a game about walking around and finding stuff: it *does* have combat, multiple weapons, spells, boss fights, everything you expect from a game wearing it's Legend of Zelda influence on its sleeve so proudly, but honestly, it's probably the least interesting part of the entire experience for me. Not that this makes me knock any points off of it, and really, it's probably essential - what good are swords and spells without a plethora of beasties to use them against? - it's just that, well, the game features an entire suite of accessibility features intending to make combat *less* of a thing, and I think that was a really wise decision. It makes a lot of sense to use combat as the bone, but this is a game with some really impressive meat on it.