While the basic mechanics of the game, battle and world-traversal, are mostly reminiscent of Souls-like and LoZ games, the real charm of this game lies within the truly imaginative mechanic of finding the pages of, and completing, the game manual, but while it is this manual-collecting mechanic that makes Tunic a very original experience, it’s also a genre-mix that might please fans of puzzle games more reminiscent of The Witness and less so fans of last years’ Death’s Door.

Starting the game from scratch you are offered no tutorial, and for veterans of action adventure games, intuition alone will get you up to speed with most of the basic aspects of the game, but the pages of a manual written in a fictional language, with small hints added, eventually grant you information to open up new passages or discovering mechanics and other answers to riddles which were cleverly hidden, but available to you from the very start.

It offers a very fulfilling experience to completionists who will scratch their heads in confusion, write control commands down next to them to solve puzzles, and who love to search every inch of a world for secrets. Others might find themselves frustrated that these aspects of the game make up what is basically the second half of it and without all pages of the manual, shoutout to the Mountain Door, they will be stuck behind the “bad” ending of the story.

I loved Tunic, every time I put it down I would think about what other things I could find in the pages I had already collected, and when I thought of something I would immediately boot it up and try something new.