Tunic One of the best games I’ve played this year. No, start from scratch – it’s one of the best games I’ve played so far of my generation. Between some fantastic slanted puzzles, its own glyph-based language, some tight combat mechanics, and some vaguely sadistic game design, its cunning little head stands out from the plethora of games we’ve had the pleasure of playing since the beginning of the PS5 /Xbox Series Generation.
But even within Tunic, there is one puzzle that stands out. Once you get into the game in a certain way, certain skills and abilities start to become clear; it’s clear that your lupin avatar is capable of more than you initially thought. Therefore, returning to the hostile island where you find yourself becomes not only an attractive prospect, but a necessary one.
-Major spoilers for Tunic to follow-
After hours of chopping down bushes, poking walls, and sniffing around the world, you’ll unlock one of Tunic’s greatest “aha!” moments: “Holy Cross.” Quoted many times throughout the game manual for the adventure game, “Holy Cross” actually refers to your arrow keys. Your little hero can use the input on the directional pad to “sing” to the world, so to speak, and interact with objects that are otherwise useless to you.
This technique is useful for a number of reasons. It unlocks doors (usually marked with runes that tell you which buttons you need to press), it summons fairies (part of the end game secret that will lead you down the tricky path of gold), it spawns with certain gold Items in the resonance world that represent hidden secrets.
You can complete Tunic without looking at the surface; the secrets you discover may give you extra items, more health, or even open shortcuts. But many of the game’s secrets dovetail with the main story. The game’s world — simply known as The Far Shore — is full of things to discover, and even the developers seem to be hinting that the game has more tricks up its sleeve.
My personal favorite is a little secret that’s not hidden in the obvious – like most of Tunic’s best parts – but in the simple… sound. At some point in the game, you’ll see a set of wind chimes hanging from an old building. Harmless at first, but once you learn about the “Holy Cross” and see the other golden items in the game have some meaning…well, you start opening your ears and your eyes.
“Tunic head Andrew Shouldice and I have long been big fans of audio puzzles,” explains audio head Kevin Regamey. “Going back in time (2012), I designed and released a game called Phonopath that you can’t play anymore because Flash isn’t a thing anymore. But it was a browser-based audio puzzle game where you There you can download audio files and use spectral analysis, cryptography and phase cancellation to find hidden passwords — basically all of this audio content.”
Regamey tells us that Shouldice knew about Tunic’s work before development began and sought him out for the fox-based adventure game. That’s not surpris ing, really; Shouldice wanted to find the secret in this game, and Regamey made a game that aimed to hide the solution in the sound. It’s a match made in heaven.
“A tunic is all about hiding things wherever you can, right?” Regami said. “So I thought early on that the idea of having wind chimes was an idea that I came up with. Just hanging some bells somewhere in the world – you see them and you think ‘they don’t matter, let’s move on Bar”.
“And then maybe later, maybe once you realize there are hits that hide secrets – all over the world – you come back and realize ‘Ah, I saw it in the manual, actually!'”
Regamey refers to the in-game booklet that tells you the “Holy Cross” and has some (very indirect) hints on where to find the game’s 12 least known secrets. On page 28, there is a short scribbled note that roughly points to where the chimes are. On page 34, a bird scribbles notes to correspond to the sound of the bell. From there, you’ll need to use your brain — and a good ear for music — to figure out the rest of the puzzle. You need to type the directional arrows to match the noise made by the ringtone to unlock the secret. Sound complicated? This is. But it’s more difficult to make.
“We are using FMOD Studio, [a proprietary sound effects engine and authoring tool], on the audio side,” explained Regamey. “It’s a great little tool that lets me, the audio lead, basically set certain audio behaviors to play — from start to finish; indicating the secret you need to enter The entire phrase of the input sequence is semi-random. So I built a whole system in FMOD so that the pairings of chimes always played in the correct structural order. It can randomize the time between notes to a given pair, it can randomize the time between entire pairs, it can randomize which bells (since it’s modeled as four physical bells, right? )
“So basically, if a sequence of notes needs to go from high to low first, there are only so many options to go from high to low. It basically plays one of the options, then pauses for a while, and then starts again.”
The whole idea was conceived by Regamey as a vague idea, after the lead developer helped build it into a wind chime puzzle and incorporated it into the world of Tunic – miss-it take on the secrets of the adventure game.
The puzzle is easier to solve if you turn off all music through the settings and turn on only the sound effects. But it also has accessibility issues. Sound-based puzzles make it impossible for some parts of the gaming community to solve them, but Shouldice told us that in an upcoming patch, “we have some accessibility options to alleviate this audio-only puzzle”.
It’s the best because this little puzzle is one of the best parts of the game, full of the best. It would be a huge shame if you couldn’t solve the wind chime puzzle — and the disturbing end-game secret it led to — just because you couldn’t hear it.
