Due to its prior success, PS Plus Essential customers receive a selection of free games each month, many of which are frequently a great deal. Tunic, an oddball action-adventure game created by independent developers Andrew Shouldice and Isometricorp Games, is one of the free games being offered in May. In the post-apocalyptic world of Tunic, players take on the cuddly feet of an amiable anthropomorphic fox, with the narrative developing as they go. Tunic is a challenging game, as many have pointed out, but that's part of what makes it special and the result of a variety of inspirations coming together.

Video game designers frequently incorporate features from other games that served as inspiration for their own creations. For example, the gameplay and exploration of Shift Up's Stellar Blade are influenced by games such as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Star Wars Jedi, and NieR: Automata, making it a veritable melting pot. Similarly, Tunic draws inspiration from a strange mix of games and doesn't try to hide that fact in any way. Its creator and developer, Andrew Shouldice, has actually been pretty open about the different influences that Tunic has drawn from.

Similar to Andrew Shouldice's Stardew Valley on ConcernedApe, Tunic started off as a one-man project. After about seven years of development, Shouldice was joined by a group of other developers who helped compensate for his lack of experience in specific areas of development. That's where this mixing pot of inspirations really started to take shape—Shouldice wanted Tunic to be both a demanding experience and something that was visually beautiful and soothing.

Interestingly, Shouldice's childhood reading of the Metroid 2: Return of Samus manual, which he was unable to completely comprehend owing to a lack of context, served as the inspiration for the main mechanics of Tunic's gameplay. Similarly, Tunic throws players into its surreal universe with little to no explanation of what's happening and no one to grasp their hand. As a reference to Shouldice's childhood reading of the Metroid 2 handbook, the only way to truly comprehend the context of the game is to actually play it through and learn the tale by gathering manual pages.

Bloodborne served as inspiration for Tunic's combat. Players in Tunic have to become proficient in the fighting rhythm, which calls for precise assaults and dodges. Since players operate a "player-ambivalent artifact," as it were, which effectively renders them an inconsequential character in a universe that doesn't care all that much for them, Tunic was also heavily influenced by FromSoftware games as a whole.