• it/its

// the deer!
// plural deer therian θΔ, trans demigirl
// stray pet with a keyboard
// i'm 20 & account is 18+!
name-color: #ebe41e
// yeah


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

i think you might have to concede this is a game other people liked a lot, but you're just not going to enjoy

(this happens to me every time everyone's raving about the newest directionless open world thing for months at a time and i have to be just like, "hm nope, despite the hype i would not enjoy this")

I definitely think Tunic's was more interesting to solve than a substitution cipher, and appreciated that when it gives you a big cute it's not just a key to everything, you still have to figure out the rest of the language through other examples.
On the other hand, I wasn't a fan of Fez giving you a clue that required knowing a specific phrase from the real world (admittedly one that cryptography nerds are likely to know) but if you do know it just gives you a full key.

my main gripe with tunic is that for some reason it uses english. i guess it's consistent with the non-glyph parts being english too, and obviously a non-english language (perhaps even a whole conlang) will be much harder to decipher, it just sounds weak that a mysterious language ends up just being english.

i don't know much about fez's language but from what i know, it doesn't have the saving grace of "the non-glyph parts being english" because there are no non-glyph parts

Yeah I agree that Tunic being a (fancy) substitution cipher does not do it any favors. Although the extra-hidden tonal language, despite also being a substitution cipher, is super cool (and I don't think anyone found it on their own before the devs spoilered it). I feel like if they'd made it an actual conlang it would have been pretty much impossible for anyone to figure out though.

Fez's language is literally English with alternate glyphs (and spoken in a plot-relevant dialect), but there's a very cute Rosetta stone in the game which is how most people figure out how to decode it. Also it does have an interesting number system that's its own thing.

it's really kind of jarring in a way, since "there are english bits too" is very reminiscent of trying to skim through japanese video game stuff, and the unreadable parts also being english in a weird cipher is like... well why would anyone do that, diagetically

Oh, heh, I rebugged this before I even got to the context that you were talking about Void Stranger. My reaction to it was pretty similar. (though I was trying to measure it by the standard of La-Mulana and other riddley puzzle games, and IMO it doesn't hold up to them either)