Tunic

Tunic looks like a lost top-down adventure from a console you were too young to own, and it leans all the way into that. You are a small fox with a sword, dropped into a bright, dangerous little world with no tutorial and almost no words.

Then it does the thing. As you explore you collect pages of an in-game instruction manual, the kind that used to come folded inside a cartridge box, complete with hand-drawn maps and marker scribbles. Except this manual is written in a made-up language, so you are reading it the way a kid reads a manual for a game they cannot understand yet, staring at the pictures and guessing.

You spend the first half of Tunic not understanding, and the exact moment a page finally clicks is better than any boss.

Combat is tougher than the cute art suggests. It wants you to roll, to watch your stamina, to actually respect the little guys hitting you. There is a real difficulty spike a few hours in that split our group cleanly down the middle, and the game is unapologetic about it.

The catch

Some of the late secrets are cryptic to the point where we ended up with a shared notes doc and a lot of "wait, go back to the screen with the two candles." That is either a dealbreaker or the best part, depending on who you are. For us it was the best part.

If you like a game that trusts you to figure it out, this and Sea of Stars make a lovely one-two punch of lovingly retro. It also topped our 2022 game of the year list, and that was not close.