Tunic Garden Knight Guide: How to Handle Your First Boss

Tunic's Garden Knight is the game's real first boss. It has a few different movesets, but should be fairly doable as long as you've been finding your upgrades. Tunic is a game of exploration and danger. You spend your time learning about the world and yourself with almost no direction.

As the game progresses, you unlock pages of what looks like an old NES manual, slowly revealing bits of information about your abilities, items, and the map. Eventually, you'll make your way toward the West Garden, the pathway to the West Belltower.

Along your path, you'll face the Garden Knight.

Garden Knight Move Guide

As with every enemy in the game, it's incredibly dangerous. The machine/entity has three main movesets. It first fires a cannon, does a sweep attack that will fling debris, and lastly, a slam attack.

The cannon will lock onto your character until the final second where it will freeze in place on your last location, then it will fire three shots. The shots aren't just a straight line, they have a slightly larger radius, so the dodge can't be razor thin. But wait until the last second and roll to the right or left. The cannon will remain in place for all three shots then you can get a few hits in.

The second attack is the sweep. You can see the Knight charging the sword to the side then sweeping out. I would advise simply falling back far enough to outdistance the sword and debris. Make sure to time it correctly, it's a rather slow attack.

The last is the most dangerous as the Knight will move toward you and swing three times at you in succession. All three will move directly to your location, so you need to roll for each hit and time it correctly.

Garden Knight Tips

First off, if you've found all the relevant manual pages, then you need to heed their advice. You want at least three attack and three defense, and the Magical Dagger is a game-changer. Also, you need to dodge correctly. Make sure the attack is landing as the white dust appears, making your character invulnerable: Time it poorly and you'll still be hit.

The best times to attack are after all three attack patterns mentioned above. The Knight leaves an opening after each. But the best combo is a three-hit attack, Magical Dagger to freeze the boss, and then another three-hit combo. Back off to prepare for the boss' next attack and repeat. If you get in a pickle, back off, wait for an attack combo to dodge then heal instead of attack. It's a game of patience, but you should be fine after a few attempts.