Tunic’s Fictional Games Manual Is A Stroke of Brilliance

thegamer.com:

Strategy guides became a bit of a lost art when games went digital; that is, when digital games began to take precedence over physical or retail versions of games. These were more than just booklets with basic instructions on how to play the game, and as they lost cultural relevance to online guides and such, gone, too were the pages of meticulously illustrated, full-coloured artwork and wildly imaginative prose about the game and its setting in these books. Take Earthbound, for instance, which originally came with a chunky tomb of a booklet that included a detailed travel and shopping guide of its cities, mock newspaper clippings, and comprehensive maps that hint at the scale and playfulness of the game. Even the decades old games such as as Life & Death 2: The Brain released in 1990—a medical simulator about conducting highly elaborate brain operations—came bundled with a corporate-looking welcome letter by the fictional Chief of Neurosurgery, on top of a booklet that’s referred to as the “operating procedures manual”.

Then there was the original SimCity strategy guide released in 1989, which is referred to as the SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. It’s essentially a hefty compendium on urban planning, including a chapter on traffic, the history of city planning, and elaborate theories of population growth—complete with mathematical formulas and graphs. You’ll be hard-pressed to find strategy guides like these for modern games these days, really.

Related: Tunic Review - Throwback to Classic Zelda

Thus Tunic sought to bring back the heyday of classic gaming with an inventive gimmick: an in-game instruction manual and strategy guide. It felt like a novel idea. Eschewing the somewhat arbitrary concept of tutorials and