How this guide is built: TUNIC (TUNIC Team / Finji, 16 March 2022) is a game whose entire pleasure is discovery — decoding an in-game instruction booklet written in an invented language, and stumbling onto secrets the game never tells you exist. A minute-by-minute “press up, walk left, open chest” transcript hands you the one thing TUNIC is built to make you earn, and quietly deletes the magic. So this guide deliberately refuses the beat-by-beat dump. Instead it teaches the systems the game under-explains — how the manual works as your real walkthrough, the combat depth hidden behind a simple roll, your full toolkit, the upgrade economy and fast travel — gives a spoiler-light map of the world and the bosses as patterns, solves only the handful of spots players genuinely get stuck on, and then — behind a clearly marked spoiler wall — explains the structure of the secret golden-path true ending as a method to discover, not a code to paste. Cross-checked against IGN’s full area wiki, a community manual translation, several Steam collection guides, Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun, videochums and the PSNProfiles platinum guide.
Why a step-by-step walkthrough is the wrong tool for TUNIC
Almost every other game rewards you for knowing the route in advance. TUNIC punishes it. The whole arc of the game is the slow thrill of figuring out a world that refuses to explain itself: you find pages of an instruction manual scattered across the land, most of the text is in a cryptic runic script, and the genuine “aha” moments come from reading a diagram, spotting a hidden path, or realising that a marking on a door is actually a sequence of button presses. Read a transcript that says “now go to the Dark Tomb and pull the lever,” and you have skipped the part of the game that is the game.
This is not a purist’s opinion — it is the consensus of the very guides people reach for. The best community resource for it openly calls itself a “spoiler-safe” guide and tries only to nudge you toward discovering each puzzle yourself. So here is the honest recommendation up front: play blind for as long as you can stand it. Get lost. Misread the map. The moment you feel truly stuck — not “I want to skip this,” but “I have genuinely run out of ideas” — come back to this page, read only the section you need, and get out. Everything below is organised so you can do exactly that without spoiling the parts you haven’t reached.
What TUNIC actually is
Before the how-to, the shape of the thing. TUNIC is an isometric action-adventure — a small fox with a sword, explored from a fixed three-quarter camera, openly in love with the original The Legend of Zelda and with the punishing combat of Souls games. Its trick is presentation: the entire UI, lore and instruction manual are written in an invented “Trunic” alphabet, so you experience the game the way a child experiences a thick import-only cartridge — piecing together the rules from pictures and the occasional readable word.
| Developer / Publisher | TUNIC Team (Andrew Shouldice) / Finji |
| Release | 16 March 2022 |
| Platforms | Windows & macOS (Steam); also Xbox, PlayStation & Switch |
| Genre | Action · Adventure · RPG (Zelda-like with Souls-like combat) |
| Price | $29.99 (frequently discounted) |
| Metacritic | 85 (PC) |
| Length | ~12–15 hours to the credits; longer for the secret ending and full collection |
| Controller | Strongly recommended — combat and the d-pad puzzles are built around a gamepad |
The instruction manual is your real walkthrough
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: the in-game instruction manual is the walkthrough the designers wrote for you. As you explore, you collect pages of a faux-1990s game booklet — counted in-game as 28 double-sided sheets (roughly 56 numbered page-sides). They are not flavour. Each page teaches something concrete: the controls, how stamina works, what every item does, fold-out maps of each region, and — crucially — the clues that unlock the late game.
A few examples of what the pages quietly contain, so you understand how much you’re missing if you ignore them: an early page reveals a “secret” use of the prayer button you’d otherwise never find; another spells out that the three coloured keys can only be reached after praying at obelisks; the map pages mark the location of every treasure chest with a small ring; and the back pages teach the directional cipher that opens the game’s biggest secrets. Open the manual constantly. When you’re stuck, the answer is almost always on a page you already hold — you just hadn’t decoded the picture yet. Pages even reference each other by number (“see P.49”), so reading them as a connected document, not loose scraps, is the intended experience.
Combat the game never explains
TUNIC’s fighting is far deeper than its cute fox suggests, and it borrows its rules from Dark Souls without ever saying so. The systems worth internalising early:
- Stamina is everything, and exhaustion is a trap. Dodging and special attacks drain your stamina bar. Empty it and you become exhausted — and the catch most players miss is that while the bar is flashing red you are still exhausted even after it partly refills; you have to let it return to full. While exhausted you take roughly 50% more damage, your roll loses its invulnerability, and you can’t block. The lesson: don’t spam-roll.
- Run, don’t roll, to reposition. Holding the dodge button while moving lets you run, and running barely costs stamina — you even regenerate while doing it. Sprint to create space, then spend a roll only to dodge an actual attack.
- The dodge-roll’s i-frames are at the start. You’re invulnerable in the very first moment of the roll, not throughout. Time it to the enemy’s blow, not your panic. A well-timed roll will even carry you safely through laser beams and put out fire if you’re burning.
- Stagger rewards aggression. Hitting a locked-on enemy fills a thin white bar under its health; fill it and the enemy is staggered and knocked back — and this works on bosses. Pressuring is often safer than turtling.
- There is a hidden parry. Tapping the shield does a quick parry arc that stuns melee attackers and reflects many projectiles. It’s never tutorialised; a manual card can widen the timing window.
- The special technique. Pressing dodge and attack together while moving performs a fast lunging thrust — higher damage, but it costs stamina and has a long recovery, so use it as a finisher, not a spam button.
- Shielded enemies need a workaround. Envoys and similar foes block your hits behind a shield; throw a bomb to break the shield or circle behind them, then strike.
Yes, TUNIC has a no-fail mode — and using it is fine
Because the combat is genuinely Souls-hard, it’s worth knowing that TUNIC ships with a generous, explicit accessibility suite that does not lock you out of any achievement or 100% completion. In the menu under Accessibility you can switch on No Fail Mode (you can’t die), No Stamina Restrictions, and Auto-Open Sequence Assistance; an Extra Options menu also offers a Reduced Combat Difficulty. If a boss is the only thing standing between you and the parts of TUNIC you actually came for — the exploration and the secrets — turning these on is a completely legitimate choice, and the trophy hunters’ guides confirm it costs you nothing on the completion front.
Your toolkit: stick, sword, shield, lantern and the three magics
Progress in TUNIC is gated by tools, Zelda-style: each new item opens areas that were previously impassable. The core kit, roughly in the order you find it:
- Wooden Stick — your starting weapon, found almost immediately.
- Sword — sitting before a Hero’s Grave in the East Forest. Beyond more damage, it lets you cut the grass cubes and bushes that block dozens of paths, so the world opens up the moment you get it.
- Shield — in the Old House (you need a key first). Blocks melee and projectiles, and enables the hidden parry.
- Lantern — found in the dungeon beneath the Well. It is mandatory for crossing the pitch-black Dark Tomb; without it you simply cannot navigate.
- Magic Dagger — from the West Garden. Its freeze effect is your best tool against tough enemies and several bosses, locking them in place.
- Magic Orb — a grappling hook, from Frog’s Domain. Grapples onto hooks, broken turrets and far ledges to cross gaps; it’s the key to traversing the Ruined Atoll.
- Magic Wand (the “gun”) — a consistent ranged weapon that consumes MP; reachable surprisingly early via a side exit of the Sealed Temple.
Consumables fill out the rest: a refillable magic potion (tops up at any save point; find extra flasks for more charges, and add “ash of heroes” to make each potion stronger), three kinds of bombs (explosive, fire and ice), fruit that restores HP or MP, and stat-boosting peppers. Note that some of these — the fruit especially — are finite and gone forever once used, so don’t hoard the urge to test them on trash mobs.
Upgrades: the Fox Shrine, offerings, coins and card slots
Your permanent power comes from two quiet systems. The first is the Fox Shrine (the kneeling save spot): there you spend gold together with special offering items found in chests to permanently raise one of six tracks — Attack, Defense, Potion, HP, Stamina (SP) and MP. Each offering type feeds a specific track (a green leaf for stamina, a herb satchel for stronger potions, and so on), so what you upgrade is shaped by what you find.
The second is the ability-card system. Cards are perks — one makes your weapon set grass alight, others boost defence when you’re low, restore MP from potions, improve your parry window, or help you sneak. You equip them into slots, and you unlock more slots by throwing Gold Coins down wells: extra slots open at 3, 6, 10 and 15 coins, for five slots total. There are 15 Gold Coins in the entire game, so a fully-slotted fox is the reward for hunting them all down.
Fast travel: fox shrines, golden teleporters and the Far Shore
TUNIC’s world is big and looping, and it has a fast-travel network you have to switch on as you go. Scattered around the map are golden teleporter pads — glowing floor squares. Stand on one and hold the prayer button to activate it, which links it into a central hub realm (the “Far Shore”). From there you can warp to any pad you’ve activated. The single best habit in the whole game is simple: activate every golden pad and every obelisk you walk past, even if you don’t need it yet. Future-you, backtracking for a key, will be grateful. Fox Shrines double as your save, heal and upgrade points, and they also refill your potion charges.
A spoiler-light tour of the world
Here is the broad sequence, named so you can orient yourself, with no puzzle solutions — just enough to know where you are and what each place is for. The first half is about gathering your kit and ringing two bells; the second half is about the three keys.
| Area | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| The Overworld | The connective hub. Find the Stick and your bearings; signs point you toward the East Forest. |
| East Forest | Get the Sword at a Hero’s Grave; beat the first boss, the Guard Captain; ring the East Bell. |
| The Old House | Get the Shield (find the key on the beach first); a directional-marking door hides manual pages. |
| Beneath the Well | Get the Lantern, the prerequisite for the Dark Tomb. |
| The Dark Tomb | A pitch-black corridor of spikes and laser statues; the Lantern lights your way through to the West Garden. |
| West Garden | Get the Magic Dagger; beat the Garden Knight; ring the West Bell, which reopens the Sealed Temple. |
| Sealed Temple | The hub for the second half: a three-key contraption. A side exit gives the Magic Wand. |
| Fortress of the Eastern Vault | Activate obelisks, beat the Siege Engine, claim the Red Key. |
| Ruined Atoll & Frog’s Domain | A teleport hub; detour into Frog’s Domain for the Magic Orb, then on toward the Library. |
| The Great Library | A tower in the clouds; beat the Librarian, claim the Green Key. |
| The Quarry & Monastery | A toxic mine; grab the Scavenger’s Mask card to pass the miasma safely, descend into the Ziggurat. |
| The Hidden Vault (Rooted Ziggurat) | Deep in the machine-world; beat the Boss Scavenger, claim the Blue Key. |
The three keys, the bells, and the road to the Sealed Temple
The game’s spine, stripped of spoilers, is this. The first half asks you to ring two bells — the East Bell in the East Forest and the West Bell beyond the West Garden. With both rung, the Sealed Temple opens, and a manual page reveals your second-half goal: gather three coloured keys.
- The Red Key is “coveted in a forest temple” — the Fortress of the Eastern Vault, behind the Siege Engine.
- The Green Key is “stolen to the top of the sky” — the Great Library, behind the Librarian.
- The Blue Key is “sealed at the root of the world” — the bottom of the Quarry’s Ziggurat, behind the Boss Scavenger.
One thing the game is deliberately coy about: you cannot even reach the keys without praying at obelisks to power the way (hold the prayer button while standing still at a black pillar). It’s the same button that “repairs” a broken checkpoint. If a path seems dead or a door won’t open, look for an unlit obelisk and pray at it. Place all three keys in the Sealed Temple’s contraption, and the path to the finale opens.
Bosses are patterns, not walls
Every boss in TUNIC telegraphs and repeats. Learn the pattern and they fall; brute-force them and they don’t. The reliable principles, without choreographing each fight blow by blow:
- Upgrade before the big ones. A manual page literally advises getting Attack and Defense to at least level 3 before the Garden Knight, and the Librarian punishes an under-levelled fox hard. Spend your offerings.
- The Magic Dagger’s freeze is your panic button. It locks the Garden Knight and the Siege Engine in place — freeze, then unload with the sword.
- Bombs and the Orb beat shields. The final-key Boss Scavenger blocks normal attacks behind its shields; bombs and grapple hits bypass them. Use the arena’s barrels for cover from its shotgun.
- Flyers want ranged tools. The Librarian floats out of melee range and rains dark energy — the Magic Wand, bombs and the Orb keep the pressure on while you dodge its vertical and horizontal waves.
- Kill the adds for resources. Several bosses summon Faeries; killing them drops magic to refill your MP so you can keep casting.
The few places people genuinely get stuck
Most of TUNIC is meant to be puzzled out, but a handful of moments are obtuse enough that a nudge — the method, not the answer — saves an hour of frustration:
- The Old House’s no-handle door. A door with strange markings and no obvious switch. The markings are the solution: stand in front of it and press the d-pad directions that match the markings in order. This is your first lesson in the game’s directional-cipher language — pay attention, because it comes back.
- The Dark Tomb’s moving platform. In the main room, the chest platform won’t budge until you activate the two skull-topped platforms beside it; doing so shifts the centre block to reveal the ladder down.
- A “DEAD” checkpoint. If a Fox Shrine reads as broken, you fix it by praying at a nearby obelisk — the manual teaches this, but it’s easy to miss.
- Laser statues. The stone faces that fire beams can be knocked aside with your sword, or blown away with a bomb if you can’t reach them safely. Don’t just tank the lasers.
- The toxic Quarry. The black miasma drains your health fast; the Scavenger’s Mask ability card, found in the Monastery above, lets you walk through it unharmed. Get the mask before you try to push deep.
Spoiler wall — the real ending and the golden path
Stop here if you want the ending to land on its own. Below is the structure of the finale and the secret true ending — given as a map to navigate, deliberately not as a copy-pasted code dump, because the entire point of these secrets is that you decode them yourself.
When you place all three keys and use the central teleporter, you face the Heir — and the first time, you are meant to lose. Don’t fight it desperately; losing is the story. You wake in a night-time version of the start, now a ghost, no longer able to understand the fox-spirits’ language. This isn’t failure — it’s the gateway to the second half of the real game: a spirit-only route through the Swamp to the Cathedral, where you earn the Dash, and a pilgrimage back to the Hero’s Graves to meditate and reclaim the powers (and corporeal form) your death stripped away. Restoring yourself this way is what makes the rematch winnable.
From here the game forks into two endings, and the difference is the manual:
- The standard ending — you defeat the Heir in combat and take its place as the next keeper of the cycle. A bittersweet, “you became the thing you fought” conclusion.
- The true ending — the one everyone agrees is the real payoff. The non-negotiable requirement is completing the instruction manual (all 28 sheets). With the full manual in hand, your final encounter with the Heir doesn’t have to be a fight at all — a scene plays, and the fox shares its wisdom rather than perpetuating the cycle. (Sources differ on whether a number of the 20 fairies is also gated to this ending; treat the complete manual as the firm requirement and the fairies as part of the deeper secret layer rather than a hard wall.)
That deeper layer is the Holy Cross — the community and manual name for the game’s directional-input language. It is the same up/down/left/right grammar you first met on the Old House door, scaled up. Patterns are hidden everywhere in the world — in floor tiles, curtain designs, the way certain enemies move, fragments on obelisks — and tracing them on the d-pad opens golden fairy chests, the 12 secret treasures, and ultimately the Golden Path: a long directional sequence, derived from the manual’s own pages, that is the game’s final and most elaborate secret. The manual’s back pages (around page 52) literally teach the cipher and tell you that “the numbers are page numbers.” I’m intentionally not reprinting the full Golden Path string here: working it out from the pages you collected is, by a wide margin, the most rewarding thing TUNIC has to offer, and a pasted code throws that away. If you truly want the brute-force list, the dedicated Steam collection guides have it — but try the manual first.
A word on “TUNIC cheats and codes”
Search results will offer you “TUNIC cheats,” “cheat codes” and “unlock everything.” Be clear-eyed about what those are. TUNIC has no cheat-code system in the old sense; the only “codes” in the game are the in-world directional puzzles you’re supposed to find and decode, and the genuine shortcuts are the built-in accessibility toggles covered above. Pages that promise more are recycling the game’s own fairy and treasure inputs to farm clicks. The real “cheats” — the things that actually make TUNIC easier and richer — are the ones in this guide: read the manual, manage your stamina, freeze bosses with the dagger, activate every teleporter, and pray at the obelisks.
The honest verdict
TUNIC is one of the few games where the most useful walkthrough is the one that tells you to put the walkthrough down. Its brilliance is the feeling of slowly understanding a world that never condescends to explain itself — the moment a runic scribble resolves into a map, the chill of realising a door’s decoration is a button sequence, the quiet triumph of beating a boss you’d written off. Learn the systems the game hides — the manual, the stamina rules, the toolkit, the obelisks — and you’ll be equipped to discover the rest yourself. Get stuck, read one section, and get back out. That little fox is on a big adventure, and the adventure is the point.
Written by Marvin Tang. Facts drawn from the official Steam store listing and trailer, IGN’s area wiki, a community manual translation and several Steam collection guides, Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun, videochums and the PSNProfiles platinum guide; all screenshots are official TUNIC Team / Finji material. TUNIC is a trademark of its respective owners; this is an independent, unofficial guide.