The 1990s is making a triumphant return in the form of Tunic, the RPG which feels like a pastiche of video games from that era. Evident in its features and blockish aesthetics, Tunic bears a passing resemblance to classic Zelda games, while the oodles of hidden passages and easter eggs tucked in its nooks an⛦d crannies a knowing nod to some of the most beloved games of the 90s. But equally lauded about is Tunic’s in-game instruction manual, which is presented in a c🗹ryptic, runic language—one that’s almost single-handedly crafted by developer Andrew Shouldice.
Despite appearing somewhat similar to logographic systems like the Chinese and Korean language, this fictional script is otherwise largely shrouded in mystery; there’s no Rosetta stone in▨ the game that would allow players to quickly decipher its characters. And it’s this mystery that makes up a substantial part of Tunic’s appeal, as it becomes a throwback of sorts to the outlook of video games from that decade: one that’s filled with unknowable secrets, and in which clues and answers are hard-earned and feverishly discussed over with friends.
This is the atmosphere that Shouldice wants to bring out through Tunic. “I did have the experience of being a child who couldn't read all the words properly, you know, like I'm just a kid flipping through manuals, not fully understanding what everything means,” says Shouldice. A formative part of his childhood was “just playing Super Mario Brothers a lot as a kid”, and he shared that he had a distinct memory of arriving at the game’s warp zone for the very first time. New to the lexicon of gaming at that time—as we would as kids, of course—he barely understood that the levels were defined as “warp zones'' in the game’s manual, and had to put two and two together to figure things out. Only by thoroughly exploring these levels did he realise that he was unexpectedly rewarded with secrets, such as concealed corridors and other strange bits, snuck into the game by its developers.
“That is the sort of feeling that I wanted to evoke. Not necessarily, you know, here's a puzzle to be solved, but here is something that has meaning, something that is trying to communicate to you, but maybe it's not meant for you. Maybe you're just [a little child], maybe you don't know how this world works,” Shouldice elaborates. “[Tunic] is very much about secrets and mystery in a big way, and sort of like, truly feeling like you're surrounded by things that you don't fully understand.”
(G꧒iven that this is about Tunic’s cryptic language, there will be some discussions of its script. I won’t spoil it completely for players who are still dissecting its meaning, but consider yourself war🐻ned.)
In particular, Tunic&r🎀squo;s mysterious language is more than just a straightforward cipher, in which a system is used to disguise a message by, say, simply rearranging the alphabet of the English language. This is something that Shouldice took great care to avoid, since it’s a system that players of Fez, a game that also features mysterious glyphs, may already be familiar with. A cipher just seems a tad too conventional for fictional languages in the wake of Fez, a decade-old puzzle platformer released back in 2012, and Shouldice’s intent is simply to frame the language as an easter egg, or an optional puzzle that players can choose to solve, if they like.
“The glyphs [in Tunic] exist to make the player feel like they're in a place that they don't belong, and were they to mean something, it would be important that it not simply be a letter-to-letter cipher to English, because [...] people are primed for this, like we're in a post-Fez world by a long shot now, and the beauty of how Fez did its language was that it was not especially tricky to figure out,” says Shouldice. “But many players—myself included—did not realise that was even a thing. And so because of the graphical treatment of the glyphs [in Fez], it was not until much later that it was like, “Oh wait, though, like all of this has meaning,” and that was sort of a revelatory moment.”
“In this day and age, if you see in a set of glyphs in a game, you are probably going to assume that it's got some sort of meaning, and maybe we'll try digging into it, and if it were merely a letter by letter cipher, that would probably be less interesting for people. The folks who have delved more deeply into [the Tunic language] seem to have had a good time sussing things out.”
But that doesn’t mean that Shouldice wants this process to be too arcane for players to discover on their own. One key consideration is to have all these written text—whether they are present in the manual, or within the environments and dialogues of Tunic—to be informative enough for puzzle enthusiasts to begin figuring things out, like “a tip in the right direction” to get them on the correct path. At the same time, Shouldice was adamant about making sure that the language looks sufficiently alien, that it doesn’t immediately resemble any modern language used today. “I wanted it to look like an amalgamation of a few different things that would be immediately recognisable in as many languages as possible as not that language, if that makes sense.” This is done without sacrificing the language’s linguistic structure about how its strokes and components are laid out, such as its position, semantics, and other rules. Even the language’s visual form is aligned to a recurring shape that can be found in the architecture and environments in Tunic. “There's a theme in the game, [which is] of hexagons. There's a strong [hexagonal theme] all over the place in the game, and so even the language has sort of a structural similarity to the layout,” he shares.
Even before the game was released in March this year, Shouldice reveals that some people from the Tunic community have already “figured things out pretty significantly”, and that the progress made by players has been extremely rapid. One such player is a Redditor known as “oposdeo”, who shares that they managed to decipher the Tunic language in about six hours, and has even came up with a . To them, the main draw of Tunic is the fictional language itself, and 🔥that this was done even before obtaining the shield in the game, which can be found in one of the earliest c𓂃hapters of the game. A big part of cracking this puzzle, as they suggested, is a matter of making certain hypotheses about these characters, and then putting these assumptions to the test across several references—effectively translating the text in the game.
“The first and most important thing is recording all language I see in the game into images that I can reference and compare,” they say. “Eventually, you find enough patterns that you start to understand not just words, but the characters that make up the words, and then once you have those, you can compare your characters and find further patterns between them that eventually led me to understand the core rules of the language.” A programmer by trade rather than a linguist, oposdeo also shares that the♔ constructed language in Tunic was a greater challenge than that of Fez, even if it’s still “not too different from solving a puzzle from a puzzle hunt”.
But there’s actually a single clue about the language concealed within the pages of Tunic’s instruction manual, although most players wouldn’t have access to that page until its conclusion. Shouldice is rather reticent about revealing too much about the language himself (“That would be cheating, if I just sort of reveal that!”), but would also offer a small tip to players who haven’t collected that page yet. “My understanding about how people have made progress is by taking lots of notes, looking at similarities in certain places. So with a traditional cipher, frequency analysis would be how you would determine which letter is E or whatever, [even if] that's not the case here. But there are ways for people to take a look at commonalities between different places as maybe a starting point,” he suggests.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Shouldice is also a fan of Heaven’s Vault, and how its fictional language is also central to the game’s myth-making, in which you have to make sense of its hieroglyphic language to proceed. “Doing that—piecing together a language—feels a lot more like archaeology than a lot of other games, because… it’s the way I imagined it being presented, is that there is a ground truth, of which you are seeing very, very small parts of. That, to me, is the core of what makes a good secret,” Shouldice says. “It’s that there is a truth, but you're only getting to see little bits and pieces of it, and you, the player, are the one who needs to put the puzzle pieces together.”
And the revelation of a very good secret is what fuels the imagination of Tunic’s community today. “Tunic is a really lovely game! It’s got compelliꦛng exploration and combat for fans of souls-like games, but also a lot of secrets of all kinds for people who love puzzles and mysteries. It fills me with a great wonder that few games can inspire,” says oposdeo. In a way, piecing together the meaning of these fictional languages is perhaps the ultimate emblem of nostalgia. It’s one borne of sepia-tinted childhood memories, of being a kid with an unequivocal love for games, and who just wants to untangle all the enigmatic tricks and obscure secrets of our favourite games once more.