Tunic May Still Contain More Secrets, Depending on How You Define ‘Secret’, Says Creator

ign.com:

It’s been nine months since the release of Tunic, the Zelda-like action-adventure game about a fox hero in a strange world; nine months for its community to dig out secrets upon secrets, decipher its multiple hidden languages, and puzzle over the curious ARG at its heart.

This jubilant community treasure hunting delights both Tunic creator Andrew Shouldice and PowerUp Audio co-founder Kevin Regamey, the latter of whom was instrumental in creating Tunic’s secondary hidden “audio” language. Tunic already has an initially incomprehensible written language dotted about the game’s signs, in-game manual, and other locations that the community has deciphered into a legible alphabet.

But its audio language, discovered a bit later, is a very different marvel. If you’re curious about the specifics, Regamey recently did a massive Twitter thread explaining how he created it that’s pure catnip for music theory, audio, and ARG nerds:

Tunic’s been out for a while now, sooooo…Let’s talk about audio secrets! pic.twitter.com/efjtNw7RDZ

As deeply embedded as this language (which the community has dubbed “Tuneic”) is in Tunic, it may be surprising to learn that it wasn’t remotely part of Shouldice’s initial plans for the game. He was connected with Regamey almost by happenstance through a mutual friend in 2015 who knew Regamey had a penchant for exactly that flavor of secret-hiding. A few years before, Regamey tells me had made a game called Phonopath as a “glorified portfolio piece” in an effort to get a job at Valve.

“Phonopath is basically a puzzler based entirely in audio files,” Regamey says. “It's like 28 stages long, and the goal is to find a hidden password within downloaded audio files, and you find them through spectrum analysis and