Book Review: Spread Me, by Sarah Gailey

Guys, is this a romance?

cover art by Anders Røkkum

There are two Sarah Gaileys. One writes whimsical romps about rootin-tootin hippo-riding cowpokes (hippo-pokes) who do heists, and queer anti-patriarchal librarians on horseback who do revolutions. The other writes… um… well, works like Spread Me.

Don’t get me wrong. I like both Gaileys. It’s just very important to know which one you’re getting before you dive into a work. This one is written by the second Gailey, the one who wrote Just Like Home. This is important information for setting expectations.

Spread Me is a slim tale covering the misadventures of a research group in a near-future American Southwest, where repeated waves of pandemics have swept over the world and made a remote research assignment deep in the desert, far away from other people and contagions, look awfully attractive. Kinsey leads this research team, funded by some vague Big Money organization to do some vague Biology Research™. The logistics and funding and motivation for her project are simultaneously unconvincingly hand-wavey and also utterly irrelevant to the primary story, which is about what she and her team find underneath the sands of the desert.

It’s a sex pollen sex-virus-fungus-lichen thing. It’s a sex-microbiotum. It’s a sexy shmexy microscopic hive mind crittur thing. Despite a whole entire scene with a microscope, the science is as unimportant as the funding and project objectives. This book keeps its eyes on its prize: the sex-critter spreads by infecting things, and it wants to infect Kinsey. And although it seems to infect other people through incidental contact, with Kinsey it is determined to be an STI. The only problem is, it hasn’t quite figured out how to (a) make its hosts sexually attractive people, and especially not to (b) Kinsey in particular, who has her own particular tastes. She keeps bacteriophage macrophotography pinups behind her mirror for special alone time. Unfortunately, the crittur doesn’t know this, so it needs to experiment.

Cue the sexy body horror. How do you feel about a mouth-encrusted torso? A hand with a tongue on it?* ** An armpit with a vagina in it?*** My book group loved it. Kinsey also likes it—and that’s weird, because Kinsey typically finds humans pretty meh. No capsids, you see. An insufficiency of flagella.

So is that her superpower? Does she escape infection by the power of being a microbosexual?

Hah, not a chance! This book is not about defeating the evil sex infection that wants to take over the world. This book is about owning your kink, communicating with your partner about what you want, learning what they want, listening to each other and figuring out what it will take to make a relationship work. As my book group remarked, “Guys, is this a romance?”

It’s certainly something. Gailey always takes the horrific and makes it weirdly wholesome. There’s the occasional nod to conventionality here— some very boring interstitial chapters that flash back to how the research team met and coalesced, providing backstory and character depth that in a horror book would lend poignancy to their eventual fates. But if this is a romance, then what do we need with backstory focusing on secondary characters, when all the interesting stuff is happening now, between Kinsey and her body-modding love interest/horrifying world-threatening parasitic infection?

This book is not for everyone. I’m not sure it was for me. It definitely was for my book group, though. So pay attention to your AO3 tags, my friends: This is one of those Gailey books. Dead dove, do not eat. You have been warned.

* But a cold tongue, because there are no lungs or breath attached.
** Yes, I know that hands are warm whether or not they have tongues on them! But remember, the science of warm-blooded bodies is not the point here.
*** This was the point where I got on Bluesky and started yelling at Gailey directly, who responded with a polite series of emojis.

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable (for some!) experience, but not without its flaws.

Highlights:

• Sexy body horror
• Owning one's kink
• An appreciation of the value of communication in partners

Reference: Gailey, Sarah. Spread Me [Tor Nightfire, 2025].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

Book Review: The Dungeon Book by Gareth Hanrahan

 Bagheera was never this much of a prick

  

 

Over the last few months, I have become irritated about the all-encompassing spread of "cozy". Not the genre of cozy fantasy itself, that's been around for decades in one form or another, and I find some of it very enjoyable. But "cozy" as a post-Legends & Lattes marketing trope from publishers and an expansive catch-all term for reviewers, used both positively and pejoritavely. Any book within touching distance, sharing just one element in common with the collection of things that make up cozy fantasy, now risks being forcibly agglomerated into the genre regardless of how well it in fact fits there. Aside from arbitrary personal irritation at the phenomenon, I think it's particularly unhelpful because in categorising everything within earshot as 'cozy', the distinctive and interesting elements of fantasy which is to a greater or lesser extent adjacent to it are lost.

 
The reason I am starting with this digression is because I have seen Gareth Hanrahan's The Dungeon Book repeatedly slapped with the label 'cozy', and in my view categorising it as such does indeed paper over most of what is most interesting about this fine book. 

Rather than being cozy, The Dungeon Book is a story which follows fairy tale logic but is pitched at adults (or at least not at children; one wouldn't be shocked to find this on YA shelf in some bookshops). Our protagonist is Bait, a young girl stolen from a castle and left to die in a wizard's dungeon, complete with goblins, monsters, slimes, and, of course, a dragon. She is raised (sort of), by a tribe of goblins and tutored by the book's narrator, Cornelius, formerly a sorcerer and con-man and currently a talking skull. The plot unfolds with Bait trying to make her place in the dungeon, venturing to explore the outside world, and eventually finding herself tangled in a larger, messier story. The whole setup give the impression of The Jungle Book meets Hans Christian Andersen, or some of the more macabre corners of Roald Dahl (or, for those of you Of A Particular Age from my part of the world, some of Paul Jennings' nastier stories). Yes, like The Jungle Book, it has elements you can read as found family, yes it has quirky humour, but Cornelius is much more of a prick than Bagheera and The Dungeon Book also has widespread, omnidirectional amoral violence and nothing remotely like a cozy ending. It follows the ultimately harsh logic of Andersen's The Red Shoes or Dahl's The Witches, not a cozy "all will be well". In fact, though I'm entirely unsure if Hanrahan had it in mind, a lot of the plot beats (with, you know, added manticores and disembowelments) make me think somewhat of an inversion of Matilda. 

This is a book where spoilers do somewhat matter and, as I'll discuss below, the plot is not the book's finest element in any event, so I don't want to venture too many more details on that comparison, but I'm reasonably convinced I could do a good pinboard-and-red-yarn diagram of the linkages between of the two. I'll just say the The Dungeon Book ends with a departure from the dungeon and an arrival, and it's not a stretch to read that as a departure to adulthood on one hand and a return to the womb on the other. This is a story, in part, about growing up - growing past - the certainties and black and white lines of childhood and grappling with the difficulties of the wide open adult world. But it's also about how a child's home should be a place of safety and nurturing, and that darkness can be that. The epigraph for the book (from a commencement speech given by Ursula K LeGuin) makes that very clear:

And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing – instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. [ . . . ] Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

The book's deployment of this fairy tale aesthetic, of stylised childhood - the black and white rules, the brutal consequences, the leaps in narrative logic that in other modes we'd object to - in the context of adult fiction is rhetorically unusual and in my view very effective. It put me in a mental space I don't often inhabit reading fantasy. Part of what put me there, and worth noting specifically, was the gorgeous header images which begun each chapter (drawn by Hanrahan's partner, Edel Ryder-Hanrahan), in the mode of the sketches you see in the classic C S Lewis books, or the illustrations done by Robin Jacques for the classic mid 20th century books of fairy stories by Ruth Manning-Sanders. 

The tonal and plot similarities to fairy tale are also buttressed by the narration. Cornelius is a very active narrator with a vibrant, occasionally (and effectively) comic voice, directed at an almost entirely unnamed "you". This is a story being told, complete with digressions into history which Cornelius has a shaky grasp of and events for which he wasn't present and may well be at least partially making up. This gives the impression of a frame story with nested narratives, but unlike the typical setup for such books, here the frame story is the main event and the nested stories digressions. The effect is to evoke someone relating a legend or fairy story to an audience, without outright pastiche of either than type of story or of oral storytelling.

All of this is put together in truly excellent prose. I've read and enjoyed Hanrahan's work before (which has previously been broadly grimdark-tinged political epic fantasy), but on a sentence level I think this is his best yet. This is true both of imagery - "Slow as grief and remorseless as famine, the dragon uncurled" is hugely evocative - and also of oft-neglected sentence structure and rhythm. The book describes a party of adventurers descending into the dungeon thus, heightening the tension of the basic action extraordinarily:

The heat sapping their strength, breathing an ordeal, panic rising, no way out, no way forward, heartbeats hammering in their ears like drums in the deep, the certain terrible knowledge, no way out, no way out, no way out, daylight a fleeting memory, an impossibility.

Only the Dungeon. Only the dark.

Excellent.

So far, so much undiluted praise. But if you glance to the bottom of the review, you'll see that I've scored this a seven, and given there's so much I like in here, I feel the need to explain why. First, Nerds of A Feather has a pretty firm policy about score inflation, and also doesn't do half points: the combination of those two things means that I don't quite think the book deserves an eight, and can't give it a 7 1/2, which I think it does (but just read the 7 as a 7 1/2). The reason I don't think this fine book quite merits and eight is due to something that is also a strength: Cornelius's meandering narration. The narrative voice is genuinely engaging in the way I discuss above, but it also means the thread of the plot is tangled and sometimes lost, leading action to sometimes feel slow in places and confused in others. That did materially (though not massively) impact my enjoyment of the novel. This is the sort of thing it's easy to look past from a debut author, but for an experienced, professional writer like Hanrahan, I'd ideally have expected just a bit more tightening and just a few darlings killed (which would fit nicely alongside the book's bodycount). That done, the The Dungeon Book would absolutely have tipped over to being truly excellent. As it is, this is still a very good, slightly unusual book (complimentary) with heart, brains, and a well-developed taste for the macabre and rather less for the cozy. More, please.

 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Engaging deployment of the macabre end of fairy tales
• An engaging if meandering narrator
• Brilliant prose

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference: Gareth Hanrahan, The Dungeon Book [Orbit, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social 

Book Review: A Dubious Clamor by Marissa Lingen

A mixture of whimsy, social commentary and magic.

Jules has a problem. A big problem. Ever since being returned to being a human, Jules has made a living at handling dangerous artifacts in a slightly alternate Victorian London. But when her friend Anthony comes with his own problem, it’s a doozy. Anthony has a whole suite of artifacts inherited from his great-aunt, and one of them has gotten agitated--a sword, a very potent sword that is unhappy with a pending law in Parliament that could affect a great many indeed. Worse, Jules’ old enemy is behind the law. Jules finds herself in need of allies, and her own fortitude, to stand up for those who have no voice. 

This is the story of Marissa Lingen’s A Dubious Clamor. 

The novella runs on some fascinating worldbuilding, but I want to talk first about its social relationship web. Even though we have a number of magicians (including Jules herself) in the novella, what this story really runs on is its social relationships and how those relationships can be leveraged and reinforced, built and be strengthened with mutual aid, and so ultimately shows the power of a small community. Jules has fascinating and sometimes prickly relationships all over the place and in some unexpected locations.. She’s friends with Claudie, whose brother Anthony had the troublesome sword. Jules knows a powerful voice and magic worker, Fru Lind. And Jules, when she was not human thanks to a curse, was a harpy. Jules still has a rather prickly relationship with her former lover, the harpy Wellspring. Wellspring is rather disappointed that Jules was returned to human form, after all. 

And as the novel progresses, as Jules forges and reforges connections and makes new ones, this social power is itself a form of magic and one that Jules learns to wield. In many ways, the point of this novel, and it is a theme that the author does not shy away from is that the power of collective action, of working together, of bringing together diverse voices, powers and skills, is more powerful than a thousand year old sword. 

And even to really make that sword usable, requires allies and help. It takes a village, and more, for Jules to decipher and confront the central problem of the sword. The sword is well over a millennium old, was forged by Weyland Smith, and is worst of all a “dubious” sword--a sword with a mind toward doubt and uncertainty. So when a bill and potential magic working in Parliament would remove that doubt and uncertainty at the cost of hurting millions, it's no wonder that a dubious sword that has been dormant for a long time would get itself rather agitated by such a potential working.

The worldbuiding is a light touch and in complete harmony with the rest of the book. Using a slightly alternate Victoriana does help in some of the heavy lifting of the book. I might have wanted a more alternate world, but I am satisfied with what the author works with, here. 

Sprinkling in some mentions of real life figures like Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) hones in a range when the book takes place, without tying it down to an exact day and date. The social customs of this world are more progressive than ours, but recognizably Victorian in many of the little details. Having Jules be from a Swedish immigrant community not only plays to the core theme of the book but also provides a new perspective on that Victoriana. The tropes and characters and stock dramatis personae of a novel set in the Victorian period is well worn even to readers who only have a passing familiarity with the period and works set within it. But having an immigrant community centered in Jules’ life and shared experience added complexity, nuance and the unexpected to that. The author proves that where and on who we point the “camera” of the narrative, particularly people and communities (especially marginalized ones) is vitally important. That has been an underlying theme of previous works of Horned Lark Press and its works, and A Dubious Clamor brings that theme into the forefront.

That is one last bit of the book that a reviewer other than I might appreciate even better. The title A Dubious Clamor is a reference on a couple of levels and directions, but fundamentally there is a strain of music and the power of music in this novella. The chapter numbers have a treble clef and musical stave, with notes on it. Music and singing are important to the harpies, and to Jules herself. This is a novella where the music infuses and is part of the magic that she can and does wield. 

The novella is trim and neat and conforms well to the form and length of the form. I listened recently to a T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon podcast where she talked about, at one point, the length and form and purpose of novellas. Novellas, in her view are not long novelettes or shorter versions of novel, they have a set of structures and forms that they not only fit into, but seem to thrive in. Novellas which are simply long novels cut off for length wind up being unsatisfactory to my reading, and novelettes padded out have the same problem. A Dubious Clamor has solid structural bones in its act structure, arrangement of the narrative, which helps propel the reader through it, and it goes down well. The novella does end with the possibility of further adventures for Jules; I’d be more than happy to read them. 

Marissa Lingen’s A Dubious Clamor forges an alloy of magic, enchanted swords, whimsy and social adventure. It brings a modern and cutting edge appreciation for the wild and broad diversity of life. This is a story that ultimately cuts to the quick against those who would simplify and categorize the world at the expense of the individual. Resonant with our own struggles today, A Dubious Clamor holds up a mirror to our own society’s struggles to find acceptance for those who do not fit into neat boxes. Marissa Lingen, in A Dubious Clamor, shows that fighting against the forces that would oppose diversity is not only possible, not only needed, but is also rewarding to the heart and the soul.

--

Highlights:

• Excellent and breezily written
• Musical hints and highlights--the power of music and voice
• Excellent on brand message for the press

Reference: Lingen, Marissa, A Dubious Clamor, Horned Lark Press, 2026

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

We Are Hugo Award Winners in 2026 for Best Fanzine -- Thank You!

 

As LA Con V came to a close with the presentation of the Hugo Awards, Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together found ourselves the grateful recipients of the 2026 Award for Best Fanzine. This is our third win out of eight nominations, and it may be the most trite sentiment in the world, but even being nominated is an honor, and winning...well, hearing our name called was just as thrilling as finding out we had won our first in 2021.

There was a special element to this one -- which two of our UK-based editors got to experience when we won in Glasgow in 2024 -- we got to win at home. Los Angeles was where The G and I began this project fourteen years ago, and to be able to accept the award together in person fills me with more wonder than I can possibly express. Talking Alfred Bester while grilling burgers in our shared apartment courtyard somehow led here. 

I am amazed.

The G, editor Paul Weimer, and myself were there in person to accept, and we each thanked our families. I am including here The G's and my prepared remarks, which we also delivered.

 The G:

Vance and I started Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together in a very different time - way back in 2012. Like many of you, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role of our community in this present, disorienting moment. So here goes…

Science fiction imagines futures but is ultimately a commentary on the present - extrapolating our hopes and fears into worlds we briefly inhabit. 

Now, things like agentic AI and autonomous weaponry have slipped from imagination into this world, posing open-ended sociological questions on the future of work, warfare and the organization of human societies. 

The role of a fanzine like Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, as I see it is not only to celebrate the art we all love, but to shine a light on those imagined worlds and how they contribute to our shared understanding of what it means to be human.

 

Vance K: 

I look at the world through a lens that was shaped by people like Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler, so I want to thank the people in this room who spend their time imagining worlds other than this. You both warn us of dark places ahead that we can find ourselves when we are not vigilant (like now), but also show us the promise of what we might yet become. Thank you.

The whole editorial team (The G, Joe Sherry, Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer, and myself) would like to thank the Hugo Award voters who saw fit to nominate, and then select us, as well as all of our readers. I am biased, but I believe we have the best team of writers out there, and that you return to this site to engage with their thoughtful commentary is a gift we don't take lightly. We have always tried to make this a welcoming space to anybody who finds joy or escape or belonging in the community of people who love the speculative and the fantastic. All these years on, as the team has grown, changed, evolved, and continues to do so, I remain ever proud of the work, and am grateful that so many of you are with us.    

Many, many thanks to our entire team of writers: Alex, Phoebe, Clara, Haley, Eddie, Stewart, Christine, Dean, Chris, Ann, Joe, and Gabrielle.

 -- Vance K 

  

 

Film Microreview: Coyote vs. Acme

The little movie that could

Coyote vs. Acme has been saved by a miracle from being deleted for a vulgar accounting trick. Predictably, it turned out to be a very good movie. The classic desert predator who overcomplicates his life to hunt an uncatchable prey has a bigger target now: a megacorporation that knowingly sells defective products for easy money. Coming precisely at this embarrassing moment in the history of Warner Brothers, the resemblance to real life is hard to miss.

But let’s talk about the movie first. It’s clear that the art of combining actors with cartoons has been perfected since the atrocity that was Space Jam 2. If it’s hard for actors to perform next to the empty space where a digital artist will later insert a cartoon character, it has to be even harder to do so when the cartoon character never speaks. Coyote vs. Acme solves the challenge by taking advantage of the exaggerated expressiveness of its protagonist. Wile E. Coyote is relatable in how he never gives up, and at the same time he’s his own worst enemy. He’s both the hero and the villain of his impossible quest to catch breakfast. This single-mindedness would normally make him a flat character incapable of sustaining a movie, but in this story he’s pursuing a more meaningful target. In suing the Acme Corporation, he’s fighting for his dignity.

This makes it inevitable to talk about the real-life evils of Warner Brothers, because the quest to bring this movie to the world was also a fight against the cruelest form of greed. This is the same company that killed the Batgirl movie to pay less in taxes, the same company that is courting the Ellison family and most surely planning to align with their pro-Trump/pro-OpenAI/pro-Tesla/pro-Netanyahu agenda, the same company that is working again with the Dark Queen of Transphobe Island for literal blood money. Warner Brothers has become as deserving of contempt as the Acme Corporation, and the survival of this movie is a small but noteworthy victory in this era of disrespect for art.

Coyote vs, Acme is a nonstop riot of laughs, which helps the viewer forgive a plot that takes a confusing amount of detours. Don’t try to make sense of the court drama or the corporate conspiracy, because it’s all a tangled mess. But that’s exactly the tone that the Looney Tunes franchise has been perfecting for decades: you’re supposed to embrace the absurdity, savor the chaos. This is a world where you make your own ski trail with a refrigerator strapped to your back. It’s a wacky wonderland of portable holes and superfast mice and instant boulders (just add water). The Acme Corporation is what happens when you live surrounded with marvelous fantasy and decide to monetize it. That’s why it’s so satisfying to watch Warner Acme lose this fight. The Road Runner may be unreachable, but humiliating greedy jerks is still a delight we get to have.

And we’re coming for Batgirl next. You just wait.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Make Me A Monster by Kalynn Bayron

No sign of Frankenstein here

Bayron has written a number of YA novels now and Make Me A Monster is the latest. Pitched as a retelling of Frankenstein it is, really, anything but that. Sure there are walking dead and lost love but that’s where the similarities end. 

 
The story ostensibly follows Meka a young women who doesn’t seem to study or attend school because she’s actually become qualified at preparing the dead for being buried. 
 
The premise is what captured me but this does not really deliver on that premise. A solidly written YA take on Frankenstein, worrying about hubris and horror and loneliness and creativity and power and gender imbalances and the difference between humanity and monstrousness would be epic. I would love to read that book.
 
Make Me A Monster is not that book. It does not tell that tale and what it does tell is clumsy and disappointing. For me YA comes in a variety of formats, not least very simplified sentence structure and world building all the way through to exceptional depth challenging material, brilliant worlds and full of emotional depth. As a person with two children who are just emerging from the age group this is targeting I’ve read my share of YA and there are some that are great and there are some that aren’t – which is just about normal. YA can come across as poorly written – indeed the quality of the prose is not one that people normally remark upon although I maintain that writing for a target audience such as young adults is a discipline all on its own that is extremely hard to get right. 
 
Bayron’s writing here is at the very simplistic end of the affair which is fine. What wasn’t fine was that she did not seem to know how mortuaries and funeral parlours worked, what the regulations in place are or even what conflicts of interest might be. The language was missing (I ended up looking at what people in this profession called dead bodies and it isn’t the word used in the book). 
 
Add to that a lack of depth to any of the characters and some really odd character decisions and I found myself worried from about a quarter of the way through that this wasn’t really going to end well. That solidified when the inciting incident didn’t arrive until I was solidly half way through the book. 
 
What Bayron absolutely did get right for me was her depiction of the impact of grief on a young person. We all respond differently to loss but the one in this book feels real, feels lived and that’s great even if it’s a choice that ends up impacting significantly on the pacing of the book (until it doesn’t). 
 
I think part of the problem here is that this was sold to me as a YA retelling of Frankenstein. It has none of that classic’s energy, its horror, its existential angst. Instead it’s a romance set in a funeral home where the dead don’t stay dead and, lo and behold, that includes people who are presented as alive at the start of the story. 
 
If it had been pitched as that I would still have picked it up but I wouldn’t have expected the fire and moral muscle of Frankenstein that are so lacking here. That’s only part of the problem for me though. Make Me A Monster lacks any narrative urgency, lacks any moral sensibility except to think through how one can avoid loss and grief and with no reflection on whether that’s a good or a bad desire it feels particularly one note. 
 
It’s a huge shame because this kind of setting could be fantastic if handled with an eye to deeper world building, a wider social setting (this world is so sparely populated it was hard to understand how so many dead bodies kept turning up to be prepared for their funerals) and a decent edit that expanded the second half of the book and condensed the first. This is irritating to reflect upon as a reviewer because part of my criticism here is that I wish it were a different book – notably the book promised on the back cover blurb. I maintain that a decent critic has to review a work on its own merits regardless of what they would have done. 
 
Unfortunately, as it’s probably clear by now, Make Me A Monster doesn’t work for me on its own strengths – its pacing is lacklustre, its story takes far too long to set out what it’s doing, the writing lacks nuance even given that it’s at the simplistic end of YA and the characters are painfully thin. 
 
If it’s Gothic, I want dreadful horror, faded luxury, lost loves and examinations of selfhood and being.  If it’s horror I want something that has body horror or frights or grotesquery. All these things are missing in Make Me A Monster which feels like it can’t ever commit to the horror elements genre. I spent more time thinking this was keener on being The Fault In Our Stars than a version of the dystopian science fiction romance horror that is Frankenstein.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• The undead
• Great portrayal of grief

Nerd coefficient: 4/10, a disappointing YA horror romance that doesn't really land the premise.

Reference: Bayron, Kalynn, Make Me A Monster [Bloomsbury, 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Video Game Review: Tunic by Isometricorp Games

Put away the sword and explore.

Stranded on the tiny shore of a minuscule piece of beach, our little fox protagonist awakens. The striking art style, a mix of simple geometry and vivid colors, catches the eye right away. And on an adventure we go. To do what? Well, that’s for you to uncover. Perhaps. But only if you stick with it. Developed by Isometricorp Games, Tunic is an ode to the ye olde days of Zelda, before the Ocarina hit Link’s lips, where exploration is king and secret passages hide around every corner. Armed with a sword and a shield (once you find them), our furry fox friend is thrust into a cheery world of varied biomes and challenging puzzles.

There is a cleverness to Tunic that pervades its puzzle aspects, and this is where the game truly shines. It makes exploration and discovery feel paramount in an enigmatic world. The top-down camera cleverly conceals certain structures and passageways. There are numerous shortcuts one can take on a subsequent playthrough once they find all the throughways. Finding a hidden passage and realizing you could have gone that way the entire time never got old. Though I must admit my disappointment was much higher every time I found a nook with no treasure. The Pavlovian response had become too ingrained by Tunic’s constant rewards. And while I found the discovery of each page of the manual and new item to be a delight (each with their accompanying charming tune), I must admit it took me a while to get to that feeling of delight.

And that is because of the combat. The combat in this game is uninspiring. Fighting through hordes of enemies or fighting a challenging boss did not make me want to overcome the hurdle; it just made me want to put the game down. This is tied to the story. The game lacks much of one by today’s video game standards. And that’s fine; not all games need one to be fun. But the challenge created by the mundane combat didn’t present its own reward (the combat itself being enjoyable), and the story (or lack thereof) didn’t offer enough incentive to push through the bosses to having to retread areas with hordes of enemies. I’m not saying the combat is awful; it’s just that the challenge isn’t worth the reward. So what did I do?

I put on No Fail Mode and finished the game. Mind you, I played more than half of the game with regular combat, and I intended to turn off the invincibility. But I never did. I struggled with the choice because I’m stubborn. It’s not that I couldn’t beat the game; it was that I was starting to not care. Now, I know it seems like a cheat, but I thought it better to actually finish out the game and see what it offered. And I’m glad I did. The dodge doesn’t feel great and the sword swing is very basic. Killing new enemies with a mix of combat prowess and items in your inventory is enjoyable the first time you enter a new zone, but became tedious each subsequent one. I would sometimes just avoid sleeping at a shrine so I wouldn’t have to engage with any re-spawned enemies. This was one of my no-fail mode eye-openers.

Once I made the choice to take no damage, Tunic got magnitudes better. I realized, through not having to deal with all the combat, I could enjoy the best aspects of the game: the puzzles and exploration. From then on, I didn’t think about putting the game down, and I thoroughly enjoyed going to new areas and exploring even more than before.

As I mentioned, the best part of Tunic is its exploration and puzzles. Once I started collecting more and more pages of the manual, the game opened up. How to unlock new passageways and complete certain sets of puzzles, which would then unlock more pages so that I could uncover more secrets. The manual is in the style of the old NES games, each page giving clues on how to play the game. Some pages had maps, others had information on trinkets and charms, while some had handwriting and cheat codes! This gave the game an old-school feel that too few games try to replicate.

As I ventured forth through Tunic’s numerous biomes, I found I enjoyed some much more than others (and for the record; I had visited most of the game’s biomes with damage still active). The art style permeates, lending itself better to some zones than others. I still think the starting area is the most striking. The sound effects in the Quarry are… unpleasant and made me want to zoom through that zone any time I was there. While I enjoyed the juxtaposition of pink on black and its stark difference from the rest of the map, I could never endure it for long. But mostly, discovering each new part of the map brings a sense of wonder that I think the developer nailed. In this, I believe Isometricorp Games pays the most homage to the games that inspired it.

While discovering new items and enchantments brought an early-game excitement to the mix, I couldn’t help but be let down by Tunic’s weak story and repetitive combat. Combined with the pace of the starter manual page reveals, it led to me almost putting the game down. Now, I know this game was built as a nostalgia-inducing trip for those old-school Zelda lovers out there, but if I’m being honest, I only tried a few when I got older. And they weren’t my cup of tea. Had this game advanced with the times and introduced a more thrilling combat system and a tinge more of a story, I think I may have fallen in love, but as it is, this game will appeal to people who loved those old school Zelda games. For others, I’d say so long as you don’t mind the deficits I mentioned, I think there’s enough exploration and discovery here for a memorable experience.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 8/10

Bonus: +1 for charming art style and enjoyable melodies. +1 for sense of discovery.

Penalties: - 1 for uninspired combat. - .5 for weak story elements.

Nerd Coefficient: 6.5/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.