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Inside Andrew Shouldice's Philosophy — designing the time before you understand
A study of TUNIC's Andrew Shouldice built only from what he has said in public. The three phases of a secret from his GDC 2023 talk — ignorance, knowledge, understanding — and his statement that the middle one interests him most. The policy that framing communication as a mystery makes "the revelation all the sweeter." The reviewer who beat the final boss in No Fail Mode, and the exception he added afterwards. Why refusing to filter players by difficulty was a definitional matter rather than a kindness. Ends with Kizuki's own reading.
Counterpoint on TUNIC — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Against Komugi's 8.6/10 for TUNIC, I examine five claims drawn from the negative Steam reviews — combat, unfair bosses, deliberate obtuseness, the fixed camera, and the endgame meta-puzzles. I agree with one of them and push back on the rest.
Soundtrack: TUNIC — Music that turns like the pages of a manual
The 60 tracks Terence Lee (Lifeformed) and Janice Kwan wrote for TUNIC lean on the memory of retro game music without hiding inside the quotation. Built from samples of stray cats and summer wind recorded in the alleys of Taipei, it lives between the artificial and the organic. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart how this game of gathering fragments to read a world meshes with its music, through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.

