Boss Rush: Tunic’s “Golden Path” Is a Brain-Bending Final Challenge

Frequently, at the end of a videogame level, there’s a big dude who really wants to kill you. Boss Rush is a column about the most memorable examples of these, whether they challenged us with tough-as-nails attack patterns, introduced visually unforgettable sequences, or because they delivered monologues that left a mark. Sometimes, we’ll even discuss more abstract examples, like a rhetorical throwdown or a tricky final puzzle or all those damn guitar solos in “Green Grass and High Tides.”

At first glance, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Tunic, an isometric action game from developer Andrew Shouldice, is a Legend of Zelda “clone.” As its title suggests, the protagonist wears a green tunic that calls to mind a certain Hylian hero, it features action gameplay that is quite similar to those experiences (with some FromSoftware-inspired touches for good measure), and it’s also set in a fantastical world where your main goal appears to be rescuing a damsel in distress.

But while these influences are undeniable, as you dig deeper, it becomes clear that there’s something different going on here. Even compared to the old-school works it’s drawing on, like the original The Legend of Zelda, the game offers little overt explanation. Most of the signage and dialogue are in an in-universe language you don’t understand, forcing you to intuit what’s happening and what you’re supposed to do.

Eventually, you begin to find Instruction Manual Pages scattered throughout the world, which as the name suggests, provide details on how to play. And although some of the text here is translated, explaining particulars like how you take more damage when your stamina is low, much of this is still in unfamiliar language that leaves many gameplay details and the story a mystery to be uncovered.

Despite this, the basic framing of this tale eventually begins to sink in. Your character, an unnamed anthropomorphic fox, explores the ruins of a destroyed civilization to rescue a fox spirit, referred to as “the Heir” in the manual, who is trapped in a magical prison. To free them, you face challenges and do the classic videogame thing of finding a bunch of MacGuffins (three keys hidden in the far corners of the world, in this case). However, after opening the Heir’s cell with these keys, something unexpected happens: the person you’ve been trying to save summons a giant sword before promptly demolishing our protagonist. To get a rematch, you need to go on a new quest to reclaim the fragments of your soul.

After more trials, our protagonist battles them a second time in what seems like the final boss fight, but after defeating them, we get another twist; our hero’s reward is that they take the Heir’s place, becoming the next vessel to hold this world in a state of limbo. If the imagery of your little fox protagonist becoming trapped in an interdimensional prison wasn’t gloomy enough, the foreboding score makes it clear this is a “bad ending” of sorts, the kind that can hopefully be avoided. Thankfully, you’re given the chance to reset things before this encounter and explore the world further.

By this point, Tunic had already largely broken out of the shadow of its inspiration. While it was structurally similar to traditional Legend of Zelda entries, and its first ending involved a big climactic battle like, well, most videogames, its focus on creating moments of quiet discovery differentiated it from the pack. You’d constantly come upon strange sights: sealed doors with enigmatic symbols, odd yellow platforms, or obelisks that seem to have some greater purpose. Although progression was sometimes gated by specific items, like a grappling hook, more often, you’d be blocked by a lack of knowledge, such as how to properly interact with the previously mentioned relics. Perhaps the best example of this is something referred to in-game as the “Holy Cross.”

To kickstart this realization, you find a page that shows the following: a picture of a D-pad, a series of arrows that correspond with directional inputs, and a picture of a door with a maze-like symbol. Once you have these clues, it clicks; the series of squiggles on the door represent directions on the D-pad—basically, you need to trace a path through the maze depicted on this object. Again, you’re never explicitly told, “Hey, the ‘Holy Cross’ refers to performing a Konami code-esque sequence when you see these patterns on doors or obelisks,” it’s something you find out for yourself, and it’s all the more rewarding for it. Once you figure this out, doors literally and figuratively open for you.

But while Tunic emphasizes discovery throughout, it goes all in on these elements after you’ve seen the “bad ending,” putting combat on the back burner as you face the true final boss: a big door. Or, more specifically, the game’s last major challenge is an intricate, world-spanning puzzle, referred to as “The Golden Path,” that you need to traverse to open this last gate.

The Door in the Mountains sits in the middle of the overworld map. Like most of the game’s strange sights, you’ll probably see it hours before you know what to make of it. But eventually, you find a manual page with a hint, a grid of numbers. The main tell for what this means is that at the bottom, there’s a circle with a line coming out of it that leads into the grid. After some thinking, its meaning becomes clear—the dot with the line coming out of it looks exactly like the symbol for the beginning of the Holy Cross, meaning this door can also be opened with a series of D-pad inputs that trace the path of a maze. The problem is that the manual page doesn’t have a line that can be traced; it has a grid of numbers.

Of course, the devious twist here is what the numbers represent. I remember when it finally clicked for me, I excitedly thumbed to page 12 of the manual to confirm my theory (the dot with the line coming out of it leads to a square on the grid with the number 12). As I scanned the page, which contained mundane details on the game’s controls, I suddenly saw something I never noticed before. There’s a golden square around a series of lines that, if cut out of the page and plopped into the corresponding square in the grid with the number 12, would work as the start of a maze. In other words, each number in the grid corresponds to a page in the manual where you can find part of the maze, and if completely pieced together, you’d have a full sequence of inputs to open the door.

This discovery was one of the most exciting parts of the whole game, as it was both electrifying and intimidating to have this grand, multi-stage puzzle laid out. A page in the manual outlines that figuring out this sequence, the Golden Path, is the key to getting “Ending B.” However, identifying this challenge is just the beginning because you have to find all of the manual pages before you can decipher their symbols.

There is a sense of layered challenges here, as on top of discerning the nature of the Golden Path, you need to figure out countless smaller riddles to retrieve the pages scattered throughout the world. One particularly complicated sequence is that to get the last two pages of the manual, you need to locate a hidden fairy cave and track down at least 10 of these little critters, who are also tucked away throughout the space. Each layer comes with more layers.

While the locations of some pages are obvious, others are in clever hiding spots that play with the game’s fixed isometric perspective, forcing you to poke and prod at the environment. What makes finding these a delight instead of a chore is that the game slowly builds up a visual language for discerning these secrets, starting with easy tells and then ramping things up until you intimately understand its subtle implications. It’s less how in old Metroid games you’d randomly drop morph ball bombs in the vague hope of stumbling upon something and more like internalizing compelling symbols and patterns. All in all, finding every piece of the manual forces you to get to know this space like the back of your hand, as constant little discoveries help ensure this lengthy process remains engaging.

Ultimately, after finding all the pieces and inputting the extremely long sequence of button presses needed to open the Door in the Mountains, you’ll uncover the key to the “true ending,” the final manual page—the front cover. You head back to the Heir, but instead of crossing swords again, you show them the completed Instruction Manual, which holds the secret to breaking free of this prison. Having finally escaped and freed themselves of the endless cycle of Heirs being replaced with new Heirs, the two explore the ruins together.

In many action games, the last boss is a final exam that tests everything you’ve learned, pushing you to the brink through difficult attack patterns or tricky mechanics. The final boss of Tunic’s first conclusion very much falls into this mold. However, in pursuing the “real” ending, you’re forced to fully engage with the much more interesting lessons the game is trying to impart: how to parse this world’s secrets. Here, you’ll likely end up filling a notebook with scribbles, question marks, and, eventually, a winding maze, as you thoroughly explore every crevice and crack these codes. While the first climax is well-executed, if somewhat standard, the second denouement is far more intense as you anxiously input the Golden Path’s lengthy series of D-pad inputs, hoping you got it all right.

While initially, it seems like Tunic is chasing nostalgia by directly emulating The Legend of Zelda series and other old-school experiences, what it’s actually trying to do is use vastly different means to evoke a similar sense of awe around discovering the medium for the first time. In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Andrew Shouldice reminisced about reading through a manual while watching his friend play Metroid II: “I was extremely young and didn’t understand a lot of the things it was talking about. But the magic of pursuing this document and soaking in all these illustrations and maps and tips, I think the intention is that it helps along that feeling of really puzzling through a mystery. Of finding true secrets.”

Tunic doesn’t just non-critically retrace what these older games were doing but charts its own path (even if there are some other works in this vein like Fez or, more recently, Animal Well and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes) in the pursuit of evoking familiar emotions in a new way. And there’s no better example of the game’s willingness to fully go for it and trust the player in pursuit of this goal than The Golden Path, a multi-stage final puzzle that holds up alongside the medium’s greatest ultimate challenges.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.