For starters, The Plucky Squire, which is due out next week, will also be available via PlayStation Plus Game Catalog day and date, as previously announced. It will be joined by a handful of acclaimed narrative-driven adventure games in the form of Night in the Woods, Road 96, and Under the Waves, The Farm 51’s survival horror action RPG Chernobylite, 7v7 arcade football game Wild Card Football, Ubisoft’s open world first-person shooter Far Cry 5, colourful action-adventure title Ben 10, and voxel-based sci-fi sandbox game Space Engineers.

Additionally, PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers will also get access to a PS VR2 title in the form of Pistol Whip, and some returning legacy titles with Secret Agent Clank, Sky Gunner, and Mister Mosquito. All aforementioned titles will become available starting September 17.

“We’ve been lucky to have one such good team. Unfortunately, recent serious health issues have necessitated two key members stepping away from the project indefinitely. We are a small team, and we each wear multiple hats. This is a loss of several hard-to-replace hats in an environment where all hats are needed.

“Given the realities of schedules, budgets, and the fraught task of reworking the whole project within those parameters, the team has amicably decided to suspend operations. For all intents and purposes, this is the end of the development of Revenant Hill.”

The developer noted that this decision was made “as a group” and that the clear path to take is the team’s well-being, “which is frankly more important than games. In the future, after the dust has settled, perhaps we’ll talk about what we’ve made and learned together. In the meantime, we want to thank everyone who worked with us, supported us, and believed in us.”

Revenant Hill was in development for PS4, PS5 and PC and followed a cat named Twigs. Set in 1919, she would live near a graveyard and have to pay rent, which could be done by growing and selling crops. Players would encounter all kinds of individuals throughout the story, from ghosts and witches to demons, with the ultimate goal of becoming a witch’s familiar.

While The Glory Society handled development, publisher Finji handled QA and marketing, and Secret Lab developed the dialogue system. Priscilla Snow, who worked on Immortality and A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, was the composer, while A Shell in the Pit handled sound design.

An announcement: pic.twitter.com/UePYAHs5Vv

— The Glory Society (@theglorysociety) November 7, 2023

Along the way, she’ll grow and sell crops, make friends (and enemies), speak to ghosts, party with witches and demons, build a community and watch the world change over the years. You can also create hexes and charms, visit the “stranger parts” of the world, and ultimately strive to become a witch’s familiar. As the world changes, some malevolent force starts manifesting, and it’s your job to fight back.

Other collaborators on the project include A Shell in the Pit, who is doing sound design; Secret Lab, which is working on the dialogue system; and Priscilla Snow, who is composing the music. Finji is in charge of QA, marketing, launch management and more. There’s no release window, so stay tuned for more updates.

That’s a question that was recently asked by Bekah Saltsman, CEO Finji, publisher of the likes of Tunic (which launched day and date with Game Pass) and Night in the Woods. Speaking recently with GamesIndustry, she pointed out that the libraries of subscription services may at some point become so big enough that smaller indie releases end up getting lost in the crowd.

“Because of the constriction and consolidation of the industry over the past two years and how a lot of companies are just owned by the subscription services, my concern is that because the libraries are so big and the companies are so prolific with huge user bases, that they won’t need us,” she said.

Saltsman goes on to point out that subscription buyouts don’t tend to be enough to pay for many years of a development team’s work, which means the model may not be one that indie teams can rely on for a sustained period.

“Will the budgets be enough with the higher cost of making games to be able to allow indies to keep making cool stuff,” she said. “Because if we turn a buying population into a subscription population, that means we have to rely on subscription fees and buyouts. And in general, subscription buyouts don’t pay for that many years of a team’s development, unless your team is very small.

“Subscriptions are both awesome and terrifying at the same time, and it could go either way. And I worry most for the smaller indie teams who maybe don’t have an early foothold as creators, that they may not have the space and the money to make more than one game.”

While Microsoft has insisted that Game Pass is sustainable as a business model for itself, the concern that it might not be as lucrative for smaller development teams over the long term is certainly one that’s worth bringing up and talking about. Whether that’s something that Microsoft has plans to address in the future remains to be seen- though it’s worth pointing out that the company has made it a bit of a habit of partnering with indie teams for day and date Game Pass launches.

Tunic is priced at $29.99 / £24.99 / €29.99 on PS4 and PS5, and $29.99 / £25.19 / €27.99 on Nintendo Switch, depending on your region.

Tunic is an isometric action-adventure game that made its way to PC and Xbox consoles earlier this year. The game puts you in charge of an adventurous fox who must explore their surrounding area and figure out what’s happening, and how to get through various obstacles.

The game’s core gameplay is inspired by 2D The Legend of Zelda games such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, while many other aspects of the game, such as its penchant for difficulty and approach to world design seem inspired by FromSoftware’s Dark Souls franchise.

For more details about Tunic, check out our review.

As announced in the recent Nintendo Direct presentation, Tunic is coming to the Nintendo Switch later this month, coinciding with its aforementioned PlayStation launch. Given the game’s very nature, its gameplay and visual style, and how much it borrows from older Zelda titles, it’s a natural fit for the Switch, and a great opportunity for you to jump into if you haven’t already played the game. Check out its Switch announcement trailer below.

In our review of Tunic, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying, “Tunic executes the ideas of classic action-adventure games with such confidence that it’s nearly impossible to not enjoy it.” Read our full review through here.

Tunic launches for the Nintendo Switch, PS5, and PS4 on September 27. It is currently available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC.

Soon, the game will be made available to many more players. During the recent State of Play presentation, it was announced that Tunic will be launching for PS5 and PS4 later this year, in September. Check out the reveal trailer below. Hopefully this means a Nintendo Switch version of the game isn’t too far away either- though there’s no official word on that front for now.

In our review of Tunic, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying, “Tunic executes the ideas of classic action-adventure games with such confidence that it’s nearly impossible to not enjoy it.” You can read our full review through here.

Tunic will launch for PS5 and PS4 on September 27. Currently, it is out on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC, and is also available via Xbox Game Pass.

As you might expect with basically any isometric action-adventure such as this, there are a lot of the genre staples present. Starting off weak and working your way up with better weapons and abilities, fairly simple yet engaging combat, secrets to find, a history to uncover, and of course a bit of backtracking to areas that are only available to you after you’ve acquired the necessary means to access them later, etcetera. So, it’s got a lot of the basic parts that a game like this would generally have, but where Tunic really shines is in how it throws in generous helpings of its own special seasonings. The first flavor you’ll taste is of course the absolutely adorable visuals that combine simple low-poly designs with soft lighting and a shallow depth of field that come together with the best results that I’ve seen out of this style.

"With almost immaculate execution and a delightfully whimsical art style, Tunic more than manages to stitch together its generously borrowed, tried-and-true elements while injecting more than enough of its own flavor into them to create a positively enchanting experience that feels much more original and inviting than it might seem like it would."

The isometric viewpoint is rarely pulled off this well with indie games, as they can often cause unnecessary confusion and downplay a game’s artistic prowess, but this isn’t a problem for Tunic – which feels tailor-made for this sort of perspective. The diverse set of locations, fun enemy designs, and other little touches like bushes bouncing around like rubbery toys after chopping through them elevate the art style to truly great heights. It’s pretty clear that every element of Tunic’s visual and gameplay identity was lovingly and carefully modified to fit its very specific tone. I was often mesmerized upon entering a new location with how each area plays with light, shadows, and softness in different and interesting ways – further motivating me to make it to the next location to marvel at it before diving in.

At first, I thought I was playing a version of Tunic meant for a different region, as the gameplay text is… not English. But I quickly realized it’s not any real language. Tunic has a gameplay language that is purposefully unknown to you, yet still somehow manages to communicate effectively by triggering your instinct to fill in the gaps. When you find a key, a weapon, a potion, or anything else, you generally know exactly what it is and what it’s for – unless of course the game doesn’t want you to know yet. This is slightly undercut at times though. Certain signs and other things will use English text as well as the fictional language, and I really wish they had just leaned into the latter more consistently.

Still, this leads me to another one of Tunic’s excellent ideas; the discovery that you yourself go through as you play the game. The main character, the story, and general setting of Tunic is a mystery in and of itself. Our little fox seems to generally know what they’re doing, but you as the player do not know much at first. As you play through and uncover the world’s many secrets within the game, having little more than your most basic video game instincts to guide you, you also slowly peel back the curtain to reveal the story itself. Vagueness in a game’s story can be a double-edged blade, as it can be very intriguing, but not having any idea about what is going on can also easily zap the motivation to continue if the game doesn’t beckon you forward by other means. But like the few games that have managed to strike that balance, Tunic does it wonderfully.

"Vagueness in a game’s story can be a double-edged blade, as it can be very intriguing, but not having any idea about what is going on can also easily zap the motivation to continue if the game doesn’t beckon you forward by other means. But like the few games that have managed to strike that balance, Tunic does it wonderfully."

While a lot of this discovery is happening in your head, it’s also wisely illustrated to you as a full-color game manual (remember those?) that you slowly but steadily piece together and can refer to at any time. Despite the manual also being riddled with the game’s made-up language, it also, like the rest of the game, manages to communicate the game’s basic components just fine. It also should help bridge the gap for younger players that aren’t picking up on the cues, or just to brush up for anybody who returns to the game after a few months of something else. So, it’s just as useful as it is fun to flip around in. Ultimately the design strategy of letting you make your own logical assumptions about what is going on based on well-known fundamentals of this particular genre – and filling in those gaps with the realities of the actual game as it rolls along – is nothing short of genius. While it’s by no means a brand-new concept, it is handled extremely well here.

Unlike the story, you’re likely to pick up almost instantly on the combat. After assigning your favorite weapon to the button you want, mashing that button will perform that weapon’s attack combos. Potions, shields, other tools and items also work similarly. Fleshing this out a bit more is the solid lock-on that brings focus to one enemy in particular and a swift roll/dodge that gets you well outside of the reach of most enemies at the cost of a bit or stamina. Stamina automatically recharges over time and health is regenerated at save points, so you generally have what you need to get through most situations.

Despite being exceedingly simple by today’s standards, Tunic’s combat stayed consistently fun for me. Smooth animations of our protagonist and his many assailants coupled with the fluffy but still highly responsive controls always added up to a good time. Also, the scaling of more powerful enemies with the means with which you have to dispatch them proves that complexity and immense challenge aren’t necessarily required for combat to be fun and engaging. All you need is a healthy balance between the feeling of progression and the feeling of being challenged.

Different types of games play around with wildly different arrangements of this balance, as they should, and perhaps a tad more variety of weapon and enemy types could have filled out Tunic’s combat a bit more, but generally, the combat system and difficulty range found here is just about pitch perfect for the experience it’s trying to deliver. It does give you some enemies and areas that are sure to bring death if you aren’t ready for them though – in which case, you’ll need to retrieve your treasure at the location you died if you want it back.

"Tunic is one of those games that totally leans into its execution to tremendous effect. It doesn’t reinvent or revolutionize its core concepts as much as I would have liked, nor does it bring any one gameplay component into the fold that I haven’t seen before, but the way it does patch everything together with its own sense of style is something to behold for the genre."

On top of everything else is the ethereal soundtrack of Tunic, which is one that you will be hard-pressed to come up with any complaints about. It’s an ideal spectrum of the playfully spirited to the downright ghostly. Each track fits the overworlds and dungeons you’ll be spending the game exploring – yet they all seem to ascribe to the same basic outline that the rest of the game lays out. Beautiful, inquisitive, and occasionally haunting.

Overall, Tunic is one of those games that totally leans into its execution to tremendous effect. It doesn’t reinvent or revolutionize its core concepts as much as I would have liked, nor does it bring any one gameplay component into the fold that I haven’t seen before, but the way it does patch everything together with its own sense of style is something to behold for the genre. Despite being a little light on depth and lacking a major gameplay hook of its own, I suspect most who pursue this adventure will find little, if anything, they don’t admire about it.

This game was reviewed on PC.

Though it hadn’t yet been previously announced that Tunic would be available via Game Pass at launch, it was confirmed during the recent ID@Xbox presentation that the action-adventure title is available via the service on Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and PC. Of course, those who wish to can also purchase the game for an asking price of $29.99.

This Zelda-inspired game looks to be a love letter to classic games of the 90s, all rendered in an adorable artstyle. On top of the charming visuals, Tunic seems to have more to offer as well, with its emphasis on combat and exploration.

A launch trailer for Tunic has also been released, which you can check out below.

It showed up once again to kick off The Game Awards 2021 (or the pre-show, to be precise), and yes, it’s still looking really good. With its charming aesthetic and glimpses of combat, puzzle solving, and dungeon crawling, it’s looking like it’ll be another solid classic The Legend of Zelda-inspired game- not unlike fellow indie game Death’s Door, in fact. Check out the trailer below.

It’s also been confirmed that Tunic will be releasing at long last on March 16, 2022 for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, and Mac. There’s no word on other platforms.