How Elden Ring And Tunic Take Radically Different Approaches To Mystery

gamespot.com:

One of the year's biggest AAA games and one of its most humble indies have found themselves compared since launch. Elden Ring, the latest From Software game, is a fantastical world with tough combat and obscure secrets to uncover. Tunic, an indie game that recalls the heyday of top-down games in the The Legend of Zelda series, is a fantastical world with tough combat and obscure secrets to uncover. But within the context of those similarities, we can take a closer look at their differences--from the obvious to the subtle--and the design philosophies that those represent. The two games approach a similar sense of mystery, but their methods are profoundly different.

In one way, the mystery of how to even approach these games creates a shared connection between them. Both are opaque and challenge you to figure out many mechanics and structures for yourself. The major difference comes in how the two games expect you to solve these riddles.

Tunic uses a series of in-fiction gameplay manuals to help gently guide players through. The manuals are sometimes in English, but more often in a fictitious code-language, with cheerful NES-era illustrations throughout. This serves as not just a tutorial, but as a central part of Tunic's puzzle loop. Deciphering the manual pages and relating them back to the world is a puzzle in itself, and it rewards your trial and error by filling out the pages with more information as you experiment and discover solutions.

Elden Ring, by comparison, seems to revel in the complexity of its quest steps and obscure solutions. The steps aren't clearly laid out, the world is much larger, and often the completion of a single quest could take hours or more to figure out on your own. But Elden Ring isn't