Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread! Let’s bring our first thread of December in right!
After a week or two with the game on the shelf, I’ve decided to jump back into Tunic. Want to finish it, a few other things, and some articles before the end of the year, you know? But my word, this game remains amazing. Currently I’m wandering around the end game, poking at a million billion little things. There’s two goals to reach the credits, and of course, I want to hit the more interesting one. The one that solves a mystery.
Of course, solving a mystery’s gonna be hard in a Dark Souls and Zelda-like action adventure with a almost no dialogue and a made-up language, and that’s where the manual comes in. Tunic famously lives through an in-game instruction manual, a few dozen adorable and thick and colorful pages just like the ones that came with classic games. This feature is brilliant. You have to physically collect the pages, meaning the game can have them as prizes for exploration and combat. Although the vast majority of the writing is in that fictional script, it does have enough human words (English in my case) and contextual screenshots to give you handle if at times inscrutable clues. And many of the game’s greatest, hardest puzzles are hiding in plain sight, as you would only know they exist through hand-scribbled notes. In fact, I suspect that my current task is… let’s say there’s a very large puzzle with a lot of big pieces, and if I put them together I’ll be good as gold. On top of everything else it just looks great. It’s so pretty!
The mechanic is one of the single best I’d seen in a game this decade. And it’s been getting me nostalgic for gaming manuals of yesterday. I loved them as a kid. I loved the Banjo-Tooie one that wrote an extended version of the opening cutscene, even if in retrospect modern me would probably balk at an even more talkative version of a Nineties Rareware intro. I love how they could seed in mysteries and secrets, not just direct information. I love how they could add unique art. And I love how elements like these could make it not just an instruction booklet but something fun in and of itself. We don’t really have this kind of thing anymore for entirely understandable reasons, and I don’t miss them much. But Tunic is a great example of how these kinds of things could become and integral and satisfying part of the experience, and therein lies today’s prompt: manuals. What history, if any, do you have with them? Any particular favorites? Are there ones you’d like to have seen? And if a modern game tried to make one, what would you like to see in it?
On top of that, what did you play this weekend?