The entirety of Tunic is sort of like a series of puzzles with obvious solutions, but only once you’ve figured them out. This isn’t a flaw, though; it’s simply by design. It’s sort of like ordering something online, but the company accidentally ships you a manual that’s only a few pages long… and in a completely made-up language.
While this can be maddening, as it would be in that scenario, it also makes the game a totally unique experience for almost every player, as each gamer will come to conclusions at different times as they play through it. Like, say, this writer, who didn’t know how to level up until he was 2/3 of the way through the game. But hey, at least I can say I beat some of the bosses with no upgrades.
More Tunic Guides:
How to Dodge Properly – How to Easily Kill Enemies – How to Beat the Garden Knight – How to Get the Shield – How to Beat the Siege Engine – How to Find the Magic Dagger
How to Level Up in Tunic
If you don’t want to be like me, and trust me, you really don’t; you’re going to want to figure out how to increase your stats as soon as possible in Tunic. While it’s almost deceptively simple to do, it can be easily missed. For instance, you’ll find a manual page early on that will show you some of the items you can use to level up, and your stats going up as a result. However, you could easily interpret that as meaning your stats are going up simply by collecting those items.
Furthermore, even if you do navigate over to the right in your menu and see the upgrade options, they only work when in close proximity to a shrine. To make a long story short, there are 6 unique items that help you to increase your stats in Tunic, and they can be found in all kinds of hidden places around the overworld and in the dungeons of the game. The stats you can upgrade are as follows: Attack, Defense, Potion, HP, SP, and MP.
To upgrade them, just open your menu while standing near a shrine and move your cursor over to the 6 boxes at the bottom right-hand side of the screen. You will see how many of each respective item you have and the cost in coins for the upgrade. From there, all you need to do is confirm that you want to purchase the upgrade, and your friendly little fox will burn the item in question to earn the stat increase. Really, that’s absolutely it, and for the sake of your sanity, I really hope you’re finding this out in your playthrough of Tunic long before I did.