Tunic Creator Talks Intersections Between Gameplay and Narrative Interpretation

gamerant.com:

The seven-year wait for Andrew Shouldice's Zelda-like opus Tunic is finally drawing to a close. An isometric adventure game featuring a fox hero, Tunic aims to recapture the sense of childlike wonder that many millennial gamers experienced during the NES era. That ethos extends to the titles' approaches to storytelling and narrative content.

Even games that use cryptic storytelling methods, like the environmental storytelling and item tool-tips of Elden Ring, are ultimately puzzle pieces that form a coherent tapestry. Tunic is taking a different tack. Game Rant spoke with Shouldice, Tunic's lead designer and programmer, about the indie title's emphasis on interpretation, and parity between the player and lead character's experiences.

Zelda-Like Tunic Releases Very Brief New Trailer

Shouldice is cagey in regard to almost every aspect of Tunic, desperate to avoid spoilers or anything else that could compromise the player's ability to organically discover parts of his game. Discussing Tunic's narrative, Shouldice was only willing to give an academic overview of the story's structure, rather than its content.

“The idea of exploring a world, and piecing together… not necessarily ‘The Story,’ but your own thoughts about what happened or could have happened in this place is what is most interesting to me. It is a story that is not an act of consumption, so much as an act of creation.”

Instead of imposing a plot on the fox, it is up to the player to excavate (or ignore) the levels of potential meaning buried in the game's ruined world. Shouldice's goal is for the player and Tunic's fox hero to have a comparable experience. The player is the fox, as he put it, with everything from the path they chart through the world, to how they