Tunic feels like what you remember Zelda playing like when you were younger – Video

Are you coming to Tunic having just played, I dunno, Elden Ring? Or maybe Stranger of Paradise? Are your hands gnarled, your controllers crushed under your palms in frustration? Are you staring down the 60+ hour barrel of Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, or want to take a break before jumping into another all-day Raid session in Destiny 2's Witch Queen expansion?

Then stop, stragner, and rest a while. It sounds like you need something a bit more chill for a bit. Something that isn't going to take you all your spare time for a week or two to finish. It sounds like you need Tunic.

I've already gone into great detail about why I love Andrew Shouldice's Zelda-inspired adventure so much in my Tunic review, but the long and short of it is this: it's a playful, gorgeous take on the isometric, top-down adventure game that just loves to play with you.

As I joke about at the top of this page, it's been a pretty intense year – even smaller games like OlliOlli World threaten to give you a heart attack – so booting up something like Tunic and immersing yourself in its gorgeous, relatively low-key world is a much-needed treat as we stroll, cautiously, out of winter and into spring.

That's not to say Tunic is a walk in the park, though; it's just hard enough to keep your hands busy, and inventive enough in how it deals with the world to keep your mind engaged and juiced up, too. Comparisons to last year's Death's Door will no doubt be made (and for good reason) but I, personally, prefer this more vulpine take on the Zelda template than 2021's corvid-filled approach.

So if you've got the got the urge to sniff out hidden little passageways, try to make sense of well-humoured, oblique clues, and hunt down treasure chests that are visible but seemingly un-approachable, Tunic is the perfect game for you. Take a look at the video at the top of this page to see why the game has won over both Dorrani and I, if you fancy.