Two Game Feature: Death’s Door (2021) and Tunic (2022)
Introduction
As indie games come into the mainstream of video game culture, there is a growing criticism where a well-crafted labor of love indie game with unique ideas will come out, but cause the spawn of countless other variations of similar games with small twists trying to replicate the original’s success. Commentators lament as the indie game sphere is pushed towards a soulless husk resembling the modern triple-A games industry, but is this a fair criticism? I think it has always been true of the video game industry that for all the great successes, there are many who try to do something similar, with mixed results. There’s no particular reason for the indie sphere to be immune from this phenomena, nor from other negative cultural issues that plague entertainment industries, such as the rise of cult-of-personalities in a company when a success hits, sexual misconduct in the workplace, or inimical fanbases.
More to the point, it doesn’t prevent great gems from continuing to come out of the indie game world, even in parallel with other great works that look similar on the face. It is only after some time has passed that we can look back and see what games continue to have an impact on us, but both Death’s Door and Tunic seem poised to both become video game classics with more differences than meets the eye. I am going to be spoiling both games below, so if you would like to get a copy of these games and play through them yourself first, please do so.
Analysis
I remember hearing about Tunic a very long time ago, as this game started its development in 2015. That same year, Titan Souls had just released in April, by the developers who would go on to make Death’s Door, which would end up being published in June 2021. A few months later, Tunic would finish development in March 2022. On the face of it, they are both isometric hack-and-slash games with gameplay elements drawn from the Dark Souls and The Legend of Zelda series. Death’s Door has a mechanic from Hyper Light Drifter (2016), or if you are looking very far back, from Doom (1993) where melee attacks replenish the ability to use your ranged attack. Tunic may specifically remind players of The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past (1991) with its dual worlds gameplay and more complicated inventory system than Death’s Door. Both Tunic and Death’s Door feature lush and eerie worlds juxtaposed against each other with a cute animal protagonist fighting three major bosses before facing off against a greater end boss, trying to unravel a mighty mystery before them.
What distinguishes the two games is that they focus on very different themes to tell its story. Death’s Door is about the acceptance of death, institutional decay, and labor rights. Tunic is about cycles of violence, religious and scientific corruption, and linguistics.
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Death’s Door is relatively straightforward to talk about compared to Tunic, so we’ll start there. In the world of Death’s Door, you work as a reaper, helping to harvest the souls of those unwilling to die, under the Reaping Commission Headquarters, which processes the souls of creatures in a sort of afterlife-like bureaucratic nightmare. It was an institution created in an agreement with Death where in return for helping Death, the Lord of Doors who heads the company gets to have their lifespan extended for some time before choosing a successor to the company. Crows who work for the institution get to be immortal. Although previous leaders tried to improve working conditions for the crows who worked there, the current Lord of Doors has reneged on their part of the agreement and trapped Death behind Death’s Door, planning on living forever, helping to facilitate the disappearances (and deaths) of some of the other employed crows.
An aging crow who failed their assignment faced the ultimate wage garnishment of not being immortal anymore, so they take your soul from your assignment to try and open Death’s Door to find the soul they were supposed to reap. Opening the door then requires getting the souls of three other giant souls who have become not-so-nice over their unnaturally prolonged years. Opening Death’s Door reveals Death inside, who explains that souls that go behind the door are then lost forever, meaning the old crow and you can never finish his assignment. The realization really bothers the old crow, leading him to become not-so-nice as well. A camp of Free Crows who are outside of the reaper institution has prophecized that a crow would come and dismantle the bureaucracy, culminating in a final battle against the Last Lord of Doors, who you then beat. No more immortality for anyone, as Death is free to do their job again.
Despite its themes, Death’s Door is a quirky, distinctly humorous game that showcases the decaying worlds that have come about due to a lack of death. Living forever has created unnatural reigns and needless cruelty. The final battle takes place against the backdrop of a worker’s revolt, as the once burgeoning business of soul reaping has become roiled with unethical labor policies, long hours, increasingly unsafe working conditions, high turnover, and a huge disruption in the creature soul currency market. This whole story is told pretty tongue-in-cheek, and in an accessible way to its audience.
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Tunic on the other hand fully leans into much of its religious theming, resulting in something much more mythical, often inscrutable to understand. I cannot tell its story as cleanly.
You play as a fox who seems to have amnesia, with no knowledge of the world you are washed up onto. Your goal is to free a mysterious fox trapped in a seal, or at least that’s what it seems like on the face. The real goal of the game is to reassemble the game’s manual and piece together what is happening in the world. The game uses some English words, sometimes put in certain places maybe as a red herring in some places, but maybe meant to represent the difficulty of playing a game in a language you cannot understand except for a few words perhaps, leading to you misunderstanding the context of the sentence. Many older gamers might be familiar with the experience of playing a Japanese import game over in America and trying to muscle through as best as possible. Alongside the English is a hexagonal rune-ic typeface. This mystery text is an abugida system (as opposed to an alphabet) where the inside of the hexagon represents a consonant sound and the edges of the hexagon represents vowel sounds, pronounced in that order unless you reverse it with a dot at the bottom. It spells out words phonetically with no marker for uppercase or lowercase.
On page 40 of the game manual, the first numbered note on The Cathedral can be translated as:
— The sound of chanting in the air.
But the last word is circled with question marks by the previous owner of the pages. It can also be translated as:
— The sound of chanting in The Heir.
The Heir is the fox that is sealed away in the really big hexagon. Is this sentence meant to be an intentional pun? Is there only one meaning that is supposed to be ascribed to it? Does chanting “in The Heir” refer to a soul inside The Heir? If you’ve ever read a commentary on a Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek passage in trying to understand the Bible, you might have faced a similar question in trying to decipher a text accurately.
Before you can get to this point of understanding, you have to roam about the world trying to gain context clues for how the language works, which leads to a lot of running around and going through the core combat gameplay and progressively getting more and more powerful. As you explore this world, at first it seems that the scientific and religious portions of the game are separate entities. The shrines are pretty primitive, like the hostile inhabitants you encounter, while the weird computer tower looking objects buzz on with LED lights quietly, or in their own rooms, looking quite different from the other objects in the world.
As you progress into the second half of the game however, you realize that both of these things are connected in nefarious ways. Some shrines are “dead” until you can power them using the electrical purple goop that comes from the computer tower objects. The computer tower objects are actually powered by what seems to be the souls of different foxes that you can pray to to get their attention. Activating the machines is done by praying to them, at which whoever or whatever is inside lets out a terrible scream as they seem to burn alive, but you don’t know that’s how the machines are powered when you are first waltzing through the world trying to get from one section to the next. The last of the three major key holders in the game is found at the end of a underground warehouse filled with seemingly endless numbers of these computer towers, after a long trek through a truly horrifying piece of world-building. Who is being put into all these machines and why?
One of the most chilling pieces of construction in this game for me was during the section in The Cathedral where you go underground and find massive amounts of fox skulls, seemingly sacrificed or otherwise killed intentionally, maybe in some cases willingly. For those who are familiar with Christianity, you may know one of Canada’s stains on its history, where residential schools ran by Christian churches were created to forcibly assimilate indigenous peoples as they were being colonized. The modern day has revealed grotesque and heartbreaking discoveries of unmarked graves and mass burial sites of hundreds of children at these places. Andrew Shouldice, the creator of the game hailing from Halifax, probably did not put this scene into his game as a mistake. At the top of the cathedral, you can find another strange dark fox creature being crucified, with their energy, blood, or whatever they are emitting, forming some sort of stream, whether a baptismal pool or a power source for the machine at the top of the cathedral’s nave.
The Librarian perhaps gives us one of the most iconic looks at the synthesis of religion and science. He has what looks like the first prototype of the tower machines, seemingly being the inventor of this terrible device. If you manage to translate the manual text, you also discover that he is fundamentally misunderstands what he is worshiping. In this game, the foxes worship the Holy Cross, which is literally the D-pad on your controller (or keyboard arrows), outside of the game. The Librarian however thinks that it is some sort of relic that he can obtain in The Cathedral, but first, he wants to kill you, the Ruin Seeker, to try and get your manual pages, baiting you by leaving his own manual pages around.
So what is the fundamental underlying story of this game? After you defeat the three bosses to get the three keys to unlock The Heir, they seem to be grateful to you, before trying to kill you in what is supposed to be a boss fight you are meant to lose. You then have two options. You can regain your strength (all of it or not) and then defeat them, becoming The Heir to the Heir, and becoming trapped inside the same prison that The Heir was trapped in. Or you can break the cycle of violence by putting together the entire manual and presenting it to The Heir before you fight. The whole manual has a surprising parallel to the Bible. As humans had a choice to decide good and evil for themselves as represented through the choice to eat the forbidden fruit, the foxes in our story discovered a terrible truth, one that allowed them the power to defy death by using power from The Far Shore. The Cathedral was built and followers partook in Holy Oblivion, as many Israelites would take on the abominable practice of child sacrifice from neighboring Canaanites. Too much power was used from the Far Shore, leading to almost all foxes being wiped out as they pitched a great battle against monsters from the Far Shore, as the Israelites were exiled and scattered.
The Heir who holds great power, attracts a Ruin Seeker who fights to take their rightful place, which is not much a reward, as it is just being trapped in the prison, with this cycle of violence continuing indefinitely. “Again the same battle, fought countless times!” The world then awaits for someone to finally understand the Golden Path and bring about a break from this cycle. The true ending of this game is that you are the fox to break the cycle, presenting the real truth of the evil being done and how it must end. As The Heir is brought to tears, the two of you happily go throughout the world together in the good ending. But as the end of the manual warns, things are not over. If you manage to unlock every secret in this game, you get access to a special room, where if you can translate the last runes, will take you to a webpage, hinting that beasts from The Far Shore will return. Perhaps this is Tunic’s version of the final battle to come in the end times in Revelation.
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There’s a lot of people believe that religion is truly disgusting and the source of almost all evil in the world, and that without it people would be enlightened and rational people. The reality is that there will always be someone who distorts the truth and will use ideas that exist currently to do so. In the absence of religion, another justification would rise up for vast crimes and injustices. Moreover, knowledge or intelligence doesn’t really solve the issue because people who know a lot about the world or are quite intelligent will also end up being evil and can manipulate other very intelligent people. The real world is inscrutable and scarcely understood anyhow, just like the insular and esoteric world of Tunic.
What are we to make of all those lingering questions about the world building done in Tunic? Are the fox ruins stuck in a time loop as their cycle? Are the purple beings being placed into the machines actually the future versions of souls of existing foxes (“predestined selves”)? If so, what happens to the bodies of those in the future and is this why their civilization collapsed? What exactly are the being in The Far Shore? Why do the frogs have a device that can partially summon a tentacle from one of those beasts? Who are the evil clones of you in The Cathedral and who are the souls attacking you in the graveyard? Does saving your progress in the game involve manipulating time in the game? Much in the same way that The Bible doesn’t explain every piece of history or ethics, and only presents a general framework and central thesis for how to approach life and why we should do so, the game manual in Tunic presents a clear central story if you end up translating it, but it doesn’t explain everything.
Conclusion
The closest Death’s Door gets to religious themes is through the cult of Free Crows and them announcing the Foretold Crow, but I honestly read them as cultural elements proclaiming an inevitable change in the economic system of its world. The true ending of Death’s Door does lean more into the mythical side once you collect all the Ancient Tablets of Knowledge and unleash what seems to be a physical being known as Truth. This part of the lore is left very vague, mostly as a way of tying the game back to Titan Souls.
I read Death’s Door as a more secular take overall on dealing with death and the finality of it; once you’re dead the soul goes away. It runs smoothly through its presentation of ideas in an engaging way that engrosses me into its world and the narrative is well-structured and clean. Tunic runs the opposite play and tells its story out of order in a way that leaves you second-guessing and having to fill in a lot of gaps, especially on the nature of death, the afterlife, and the possibility of killing the soul forever. There are some sequences in playing the game that are natural, but notably the bosses do not have to be done in a set order. The manual pages, signs, and dialogue you get reveal small bits of the truth about what is happening, sometimes misleadingly, which you are free to mostly gloss over if you so like.
The conclusion of Tunic is an overarching narrative that gives some clarity and peace to those who have spent the time to mull over all its secrets and nooks and crannies, with or without help from other players around them. As much as this game recreates much of the old school vibe of figuring out a game for yourself, the existence of the internet is not shunned, but I think even encouraged. Most people who play this game generally won’t do any translating while playing and just look it up later, which is completely valid. “Share your wisdom” as the game says. This may be especially prescient for some of the more frustrating puzzles.
The two games each build a unique world with very different world-building and storytelling styles. The unifying theme of death and unnaturally prolonging life is a heavy one. Where one game seeks to add levity to the situation as it wryly lets you wander about the grand world as it gently presents its political ideas to you, the other game is unafraid to add gravitas as you look through both the beauty of the world that has been created, and the incomprehensible horror of the religious and scientific idolatry that has destroyed its inhabitants.
There are quibbles you could have about both games. In Death’s Door I wish they did more with showcasing more of the crows who are stuck in managerial work, or those who end up dying, but we are given very little lore about these incidents, with only just enough to know that our bad boss is in fact bad. In Tunic I wish there was a way to do anything to help those who save all the souls seemingly trapped in the depths of The Quarry, the bizarre cult members who are all hostile, or the dead inhabitants who are now shuttered in the ethereal realm. Ultimately, these are both well-crafted pieces where the gameplay, design choices, and narrative all come together into more than cohesive stories. They create a wonderful world I want to learn more about them, see more ideas built from them, and play around in for just a bit longer.
Post-Publication (5/24/2022)
I have heard the case that Death’s Door has a lot of references to Jewish mythology that I very well may have missed. I think this position deserves some more fleshing out, and perhaps I will post a follow-up to this article in the future amending my full opinion.
