Indie game Tunic was released recently, and alongside its charming art and gameplay also came a brand-new language. The game is full of rune-like writings, which players can easily translate through a few different means, if they so choose.
Game-specific languages aren't anything new, as they've been present in big releases like Greedfall and Final Fantasy X . Although not completely necessary, it's actually pretty useful to translate the language of Tunic, as it contains vital information. While players won't be completely out of the loop if they don't translate the game's language, a good chunk of the game's text is unreadable without doing so. Thankfully, there are already plenty of tools to make the process easier, including a guide and a translation tool.
The backbone of how Tunic's language works is phonemes, which are basically just individual sounds within a language. For example, "a," "ch," and "ph" are all phonemes. Each phoneme has its own individual character, whether it's made from one English letter or multiple. In Tunic, the language's characters generally represent a vowel or consonant combination. These characters are then connected using a horizontal line that goes through the center of the characters. When connected like this, the characters form words.
Each letter fits within a hexagonal structure and connects different points within it to create lines representing either vowel or consonant sounds. The outer points are used for vowels, and the inner points are used for consonants. Each letter has a different combination of lines within the hexagon, and consonant and vowel edges can be used simultaneously within a character to represent a full phoneme. Although the language looks really bizarre, it's actually just English using different characters, making it less of a language and more like a particularly complex code. This means there aren't any new words to memorize, just a different way to write the words.
While it sounds complicated, all it takes is some practice getting used to the pattern. Thankfully, if that sounds like too much, there are a few resources for translation. Reddit user oposdeo has made a guide on how exactly the language works. It goes over the character formation, the specific characters found in the language and the grammar, which is the same as in English. If translating by hand is too much, there's also an interactive translation web app made by Reddit user Scylithe. Players can use this tool to draw a character and see the sound it represents. To do this, drag the connecting dots to form the lines within the character.
Players have also come up with plenty of other fun translation methods. For example, Reddit user officefan55 made a physical "talking board" out of popsicle sticks that they use to physically make the runes. There are some other similarly creative solutions to the language barrier in Tunic, though the ones mentioned here are the most notable. Overall, the complexity of Tunic's language has led to plenty of out-of-the-box thinking and creative methods of translation to reduce the workload of the general player base.
Even with these resources readily available for any player to read through and use, translating Tunic's language can still take a good deal of effort and time. Thankfully, players can bypass some of this using an already-translated version of the instruction manual as per Reddit users skititlez and RioxAA. The manual is actually included throughout the game, so this is a pretty useful tool. However, there's still plenty of text in the game that's left untranslated outside of the instruction booklet.
Since there's so much extra text available to translate, it's definitely worth putting in the time to learn how to do so. It definitely takes some brainpower and effort, but it helps not only with progressing through the game but also with the immersion of Tunic's gameplay and story. There's nothing quite like going through a game and being able to understand all of its texts without having to look through a walkthrough.
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