A ‘Tunic’ player has translated the in-game language

Within a month of being released, indie action-slasher Tunic has already had its in-game language translated by a player who says it adds “nice lore and flavour”.

Posted on Reddit (thanks, Eurogamer), user Oposdeo hasn’t actually finished the game and is only a few hours into it, but has translated the world’s fictional language for all to read.

You can see how some of the words appear to work, as well as the structure of the language, here.

Oposdeo said: “Of the 44 English phonemes, I think two are not used, since 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 there not being a formal “ORE” phoneme”.

They added, “I’ve translated maybe ten guidebook pages to find all these symbols, so I’m quite confident in them, though maybe there’s a couple rare ones missing”.

Oposdeo was asked if they are a linguist by day, but confirmed that they’re actually a programmer. The translations provided by Oposdeo mean that people could finally find out that the logo text says “secret legend”, and suddenly there’s a flurry of conversation surrounding potential hidden puzzle solutions.

Speaking to The Gamer, Tunic developer Andrew Shouldice mentioned the in-game language, saying “The glyphs 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”.

In NME’s review, Jason Coles said that Tunic is “a wonderfully satisfying adventure game that’s not afraid to kill you and leave you confused as to what just happened”, and awarded it four-stars.

In other news, after the game was mysteriously removed from sale two months after release, Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory’s disappearance has been explained, and it was due to a DMCA filing from the original tabletop-RPG creators.