Tunche

Every so often a small studio makes a game that looks like it cost ten times its budget. Tunche is that game. Built by Peru’s LEAP Game Studios and published by HypeTrain Digital, it takes the oldest arcade template there is—the side-scrolling brawler—and wraps it in hand-drawn Amazonian mythology so lush it belongs on a gallery wall. This is a beat ‘em up that wants to be a picture book, and for long stretches it succeeds.

The setup is deliberately simple. You pick one of five heroes—Rumi the sorceress, Pancho the musician, Qaru the bird boy, Nayra the warrior, and, in a genuinely charming crossover, Hat Kid from A Hat in Time—and push into a rainforest to unravel the mystery of the spirit called Tunche. Each hero plays differently enough to matter: different combos, different reach, different ultimate abilities. Then LEAP grafts roguelite progression onto the classic formula. Rooms are procedurally arranged, paths branch, and between runs you spend earned currency on skills, mantras, and upgrades that make the next attempt a little less brutal.

Positioned against genre heavyweights, Tunche knows exactly what it is—and what it isn’t. It’s not chasing the mechanical depth of a Hades or the punishing systems of a Dead Cells. It’s a pick-up-and-play couch brawler dressed in roguelite clothing, aimed squarely at players who want to laugh with friends on a sofa, not min-max build synergies alone at 2 a.m. The tension is baked into the design: the presentation and co-op are the draw, and there simply isn’t enough game underneath them. That tension defines the entire experience.

• Five distinct heroes: From Rumi’s ranged sorcery to Nayra’s brute close-quarters pressure, each character rewrites how you approach a room. Hat Kid is a delightful, well-earned guest.
• Grade-based combat: A stylish ranking system pushes you toward fluid, high-risk offense. Play cautiously and your score suffers; commit to the combo and you’re rewarded with better ranks and loot.
• Four-player local co-op: The headline act. Up to four on one couch, mainlining chaos.
• Roguelite progression: Procedurally arranged rooms, branching paths, and between-run unlocks—skills, mantras, upgrades—that soften the difficulty curve over time.
• Four themed worlds: Distinct enemies, mini-bosses, and boss encounters threaded together by a light narrative.

The Gameplay Loop

Tunche’s core loop is arcade DNA modernized. You enter a room, a wave of enemies spawns, you clear it, you move on. Between rooms you choose a branch on a small map—more combat, a shop, a shrine, a boss. Clear a world, fight its guardian, unlock a little more of the story and a few more permanent upgrades. Die, and you cash out your progress into meta-currency and start again a fraction stronger.

What keeps this from being button-mashing is the grade system. Combat is about clearing the screen beautifully, not just clearing it. Chain attacks, dodge at the right frame, mix your moveset, and your grade climbs—and with it, your rewards. It’s a smart hook borrowed from character-action games like Devil May Cry, scaled down for a brawler. At its best, the combat plays like conducting a jungle spirit orchestra, weaving between enemies, never touching the ground.

Here’s the problem: the song is short. Tunche’s enemy variety is limited, and the design runs out of road fast. The roster of foes and the four-world structure mean the game shows most of its hand early. The grade system encourages expressive play, but expressive play needs a rich vocabulary of threats to stay interesting, and Tunche’s dictionary is thin. Solo, over longer sessions, the combat curdles from stylish to repetitive—the same motions against the same silhouettes.

Roguelite Depth, or the Lack of It

This is where the review has to be firm. Tunche wears the roguelite badge, but it doesn’t earn it the way the genre’s leaders do. The between-run upgrades exist, and they do make runs stronger, but they rarely make each run feel meaningfully different. There’s no rich set of build permutations—no moment where a random drop rewrites your entire strategy. Runs vary in room order, not in identity. Compared to the systemic depth of the games it’s implicitly measured against, Tunche’s roguelite layer feels like a structural convenience—a way to justify replaying a short campaign—rather than a genuine engine of emergent play.

And the campaign is short. That’s not automatically a flaw; plenty of great games respect your time. But when the pitch is “roguelite replayability,” a thin content base and shallow progression systems undercut the very reason you’d come back. The game asks you to grind through familiar rooms with only modest mechanical novelty as the carrot.

Where It Actually Shines

Put three friends on the couch, though, and every one of those criticisms softens. Co-op is Tunche’s true genre. The repetition matters less when you’re shouting at a friend who just stole your kill. The thin enemy variety matters less when the real content is the four of you improvising, colliding, reviving each other in the last second. The gorgeous art becomes a shared spectacle. Tunche is a party game that happens to have roguelite bones, not a deep solo roguelite pretending to be a party game, and it’s excellent in that role. The onboarding is frictionless; a non-gamer can grab a controller and be laughing within thirty seconds. That accessibility is a real achievement, and LEAP deserves credit for it.

The art is the reason to care. Tunche is hand-drawn, fully animated, and unmistakably rooted in Latin-American and Amazonian visual traditions. Characters emote with the exaggerated bounce of a Saturday-morning cartoon; backgrounds layer misty rainforest depth behind foreground brawling. Bosses are drawn with real menace and personality. This is a storybook that fights back, and it’s easily the most memorable thing about the game.

The stylized presentation also ages gracefully—there’s no photorealism to date it. A 2D brawler of this scope is light on hardware by design, and the art direction is built to stay readable even when the screen fills with four players and a swarm of enemies. The UI is clean and legible, staying out of the way of the art. If there’s a critique, it’s that the same visual richness that dazzles early also exposes the content ceiling: you want more of these beautiful enemies and worlds, and the game can’t give it to you.

On Steam, Tunche is best played with a controller, full stop—this is arcade combat, and a gamepad is the native tongue. Keyboard works, but the grade system’s timing-heavy inputs feel far more natural on a stick and face buttons. The PC version’s advantage is straightforward: get four controllers plugged into one machine and you have the definitive couch setup.

On Nintendo Switch, Tunche arguably finds its spiritual home. The Switch is the couch co-op console, and the ability to hand a pair of Joy-Con to a friend for instant two-player—or dock it and go four-wide—fits the game’s pick-up-and-play soul perfectly. Portability suits the bite-sized run structure; a single run is a perfect commute-length session. The trade-off is the usual one: the hand-drawn art is stunning on a good TV and merely very good on the handheld screen. For most players, though, the Switch version’s flexibility outweighs the fidelity gap.

Tunche is a small studio punching above its weight on presentation and losing a few rounds on content. LEAP Game Studios has made something beautiful and fun—provided you play it the way it’s meant to be played. Alone, it’s a brawler that flatters you early and tires you out by the end, and that’s a hard sell at $19.99. On a couch with three friends, it’s a night you’ll remember. But for most people, the thin roguelite layer and shallow content make it difficult to recommend as anything more than a niche co-op pick. Buy it for the co-op, stay for the art, and don’t expect the roguelite scaffolding to hold much weight. It’s a wonderful appetizer that keeps insisting it’s the main course.