Song of Nunu: A league of legends story, Developed by Tequila works and the most recent release from publisher Riot Forge with the upcoming Bandle Tale being it’s last with the announcement of Riot Gaming’s decision to close down this side of the business due to lack of direction. Released in November 2023, A Song of Nunu is the story of Nunu, a young Notai boy, and his Yeti friend Willump who are residents of the Freljord a frozen land where many of League of Legends champions originate from.
Song of Nunu is an adventure platformer that puts you into the shoes of our favorite icy champion, Nunu and his best friend Willump the Yeti. The pair head out on an adventure to find Nunu’s mother and along the way end up saving their homeland and uncovering Nunu’s own magic along the way. When you aren’t having snowball fights with your yeti friend you will be using each of their skills to create floating ice chunks to jump across rivers, traverse jagged rocks and utilizing your magical flute to solve cryptic puzzles hidden along the way which will unlock entries in your journal surrounding not just our two champions but also many others from the League of Legends universe.
Your adventure begins traversing across the land on its surface and seeing some vibrant and beautiful colors in its landscape. Tequila Works put some big emphasis on making sure that everything looked pretty in your search for Nunu’s mom and the Heart of blue. Snow and Ice are a major theme of this game, and they went to great effort to make it pop. It’s when you start having to interact with environments that the cracks start to show a bit as that is when you notice that the wall you can scale, it looks rougher and stands out in a way that doesn’t quite suit the environment, plainly speaking it looks rough and not just because it’s mostly rocks. As a gamer I understand that you need to make things that interact sometimes a bit easier to notice so that you think to yourself “oh this must be where I go” but there are ways to do it that don’t make it quite look so out of place.
Aside from the platforming, you will also need to utilize your flute playing skills to traverse different environments and also change the area around you to create ways for you to move forward. The flute playing puzzles were cute as you used Nunu’s flute that was gifted to him by his mother to lift and move pieces around to create reactions with either Willump or Nunu himself sets them into play. Probably the part that I least enjoyed was any time I had to utilize stealth to progress the story. Nunu and Willump are not stealthy characters, he is a loud and vibrant little boy and Willump is a giant blue yeti, you can’t hide either of those easily. It takes these skills to unlock the lore in the game via the journal which will introduce you to many characters that I will speak about later.
So far, it’s a lot of platforming and puzzle solving in Song of Nunu, you might ask yourself, is there combat? The answer is Yes, there is combat, but most of the time when it begins you will be jumping on Willump’ s shoulders and controlling him and not Nunu. While you play as Nunu, you are capable of throwing snowballs which as you can imagine don’t do much. When Willump is in play it’s a very different story as he is as I mentioned before, a giant yeti with four very thick arms. Combat is mainly swipe attacks from Willump and some finishing moves that occasionally involve Nunu. Overall, its pretty repetitive and the game itself doesn’t have a lot of fights so I guess it explains why it doesn’t need to be too flashy.
With this taking place in the Freljord, you will meet, and battle some of the best characters to come out of there starting with one of my personal favorites, Braum, who considers everything furry a Poro of some kind. Braum will be a sort of guide for Nunu who gives him lessons on being a Hero along his adventure. You will also meet Ornn, the blacksmith and see mentions of Ashe and Trundle as warriors of the north worthy of using weapons made of True ice and “fight” against my favorite bear, Volibear. Of course, the big bad has to be Lissandra, the dark ice witch, to be a fitting theme of ice versus ice.
While overall the game’s battles are pretty straightforward with most consisting of avoiding boss mechanics and projectiles until you can get close enough to melee with Willump, the final battle against Lissandra had some Cell versus Gohan vibes. Nunu and Willump clash with Lissandra letting loose with their magic for a climactic button mash battle to find out who’s Ice magic would overpower the other akin to the Kamehameha vs Kamehameha final Cell battle. In a truly heartbreaking moment, we see Willump overtaken by Lissandra’s dark ice and turned into a frenzied beast but after every strike against Nunu you see his internal conflict of not wanting to hurt him as he struggles to contain himself. Thankfully it works out for our little Nunu in the end as he is able to commune with his mother and finds out that the Heart of Blue was inside of him all along and this adventure is what it took to realize it.
So, at this point most people are probably wondering to themselves if it’s worth picking this up and my answer would have to be a solid yes. The interactions between Nunu and Willump are absolutely what makes this game so heartwarming and entertaining. Willump can’t speak but I still felt, like Nunu, that I could understand every word he said to me. Tequila works put in a lot of time to make sure that when Nunu is talking to Willump, you can see everything he is trying to say in his beautiful yeti face with his emotions and sounds. It’s their story that kept me playing through the end, not the fate of their homeland.
Song of Nunu, for the most part, looks like a PS5 game but plays more like something from when I had a PlayStation one and played a classic like Spyro. It’s slow when compared to games from the last few years and while it isn’t a bad thing, I don’t see it catching the eye of many who are used to games that are a bit faster paced. Sitting at just about 5 or 6 hours of gameplay you can knock it out in a single playthrough if you are feeling feisty or break it down into small segments. Is it beautiful? sometimes. Does it have a great story that gives a League of Legends character who until now we only knew his lore from a webpage? Yes, I think so. While the end does leave it open for a sequel to come out, time will tell if Nunu and Willump will return like this again.
