TUNIC

TUNIC sits at the intersection of Zelda-style action and the small-fox-in-a-big-world tone of fairy-tale illustration. The fox you play wakes on a ruined coastline with nothing but curiosity, and the game refuses to tell you what to do — the in-game instruction manual, which you reconstruct page by page across the campaign, is the only source of guidance, and it's written in a language you can't read.

Combat is technical: dodge, block, parry, strike, with stamina that punishes button-mashing and a moveset that has to be unlocked one item at a time. The world connects shady forests, sprawling ruins, and labyrinthine catacombs, with bosses hidden in places ranging from deep beneath the earth to high above the clouds.

The manual is the trick of the design. Pages teach you techniques, reveal map fragments, hint at puzzles, and contain secrets the game never explains directly — some pages are decryption keys for the unreadable language, others are full-color illustrations that hint at the lore. Andrew Shouldice spent years on the project largely solo; the sound design is by Power Up Audio, and the original score is by Lifeformed (Dustforce).