Tunic has a mysterious language that we see in the game in various forms, including the game guide. Although players are supposed to intuitively understand the strange glyphs, some players, like Reddit user Oposdeo, have attempted to translate the language.
Tunic is described as a “isometric action game about a little fox on a big adventure“. Players have to explore a “ruined land” in which “battle colossal beasts, collect strange and powerful items, and uncover long-lost secretsAlthough the game doesn’t really involve translation, it seems that players have added the language to this list of secrets.
“I picked up the game recently really wanting to crack this languageOposdeo noted on Reddit.I wrote a handy guide for my use while translating all the text in the game“. The player went on to say that “I’ve translated maybe ten pages of the guide to finding all these symbols, so I’m pretty sure about them, although maybe a couple of weird ones are missing“.
Regarding the structure of language, Oposdeo said that “Of the 44 English phonemes I think two are not used as they have very similar alternatives and I think the ‘ure’ phoneme in ‘pure’ is treated as ‘ore’ in this game as the symbol is used for words like ‘your’ and ‘north’ despite the absence of a formal ‘ore’ phoneme“. Oposdeo has drawn up a list of letters, breaking them down into vowels and consonants.
“Reading the pages usually brings a lot of wisdom and flavor, as well as concrete explanations of what the drawings imply.“, Oposdeo points out. “Normally, you don’t learn much more about the gameplay, but you can certainly discover things sooner than you would otherwise, understand the game better, and find some interesting secrets.“.
The game’s developer, Andrew Shouldice, recently spoke about the design of the language in Tunicpointing out how the “glyphs exist to make the player feel like they’re in a place they don’t belong“. Shouldice pointed out that “if they were to mean anything, it would be important that they were not simply a letter-by-letter cipher of English“.
Shouldice mentioned that “these days, if you see a set of glyphs in a game, you’re probably going to assume it has some kind of meaning and maybe try to dig into it“. The developer added that “if it was just a letter-by-letter cipher, it would probably be less interesting to people“. Shouldice went on to describe how “the people who have delved into it seem to have had a good time figuring things out“.