As players make their way through Tunic, they will encounter some amount of writing that they can immediately decipher. However, much of the game's text is seemingly unreadable, as it is written in a unique language with its own characters. It is actually possible to translate the language in Tunic, though, and this guide will detail several resources that fans can use to do exactly that.
Tunic: Language Translation
To start simply, Tunic's language is composed of a variety of characters that represent sounds. While these characters occasionally correspond to the sound of a single English letter, they typically represent consonant and vowel combinations. Furthermore, the language's characters can be connected to one another to form words, and that connection is represented by a horizontal line that runs through the characters.
With the basic structure of the language in this game from developer Andrew Shouldice established, it is now necessary to look at its characters more closely. In essence, every character in Tunic's language is designed around a single shape, which is something like a hexagon with a couple of internal points. The exterior angles and internal points of this shape can then be connected in various configurations to create characters that are related to specific sound combinations.
Fortunately, indie game fans need not start from scratch to determine how sounds and characters relate to one another, as there are a couple of resources that can be used to bypass that preliminary step. The first of those resources is the chart in the following Reddit post, which was created by user oposdeo and showcases exactly how rendered connections translate to readable sounds. As previously noted, a single character will typically have connections for both a vowel and consonant sound, and a circle below the character indicates that the positions of the vowel and consonant sound should be swapped when reading it.
Alternatively, players can use this Tunic language translation tool, which was created by Reddit user Scylithe, to draw a character and see its associated sound. To perform this drawing, players should click and drag over the connections that are rendered in the character that they are trying to translate, and the vertical line at the bottom should be filled in when the aforementioned circle appears below the character.
While fans of isometric games should now have the tools that they need to decipher the language in Tunic, actually performing that translation can be quite daunting. Luckily, Reddit users skititlez and RioxAA have uploaded a translated version of Tunic's instruction book for everyone to enjoy. This leaves just the non-manual text for fans to figure out, which is a much more manageable endeavor.
Tunic is available now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.