Anyone who has played charm Ao Dai I know it’s a bit confusing. There’s an instant nonsense language to try and decipher, for one thing. Then you have a In-game manual that has been split, with pages spanning the world to find before you can figure out how to do everything your little fox can do. Well, now sound designer Kevin Regamey has explained the whole other secret side of Tunic, and it turns out that the game’s soundtrack contains an entirely different language.
Pour beans over a Twitter thread, Regamey dives into how players can uncover Tunic’s audio secrets and how they can be decoded. It’s probably best to know that there will be some vandals involved, so be careful.
“In the early stages of development, we imagined the game to have a kind of ‘voice’ – a voice that the player wasn’t equipped to interpret,” said Regamey. I designed a musical cipher – heard throughout the game, but never acknowledged.
Regamey explains that Tunic’s enigmatic written language is “Trunic” which is phonetic, with its characters often representing paired consonants and vowels. Learning this language can lead the player to the Glyph Tower, which directs them to this website. Download the site’s audio and watch it in spectral mode, and Tunic’s secret audio language is revealed. They also include glyphs, but correspond directly to pentatonic arpeggios. Regamey says players have named this audio language “Tuneic”.
Regamey’s sound freaks with Tuneic require you to have a bit of music theory to understand perfectly, and I think of music as a microwave oven, so I’ll spend it. give you any long and loose explanations. Essentially, the arpeggio is the musical equivalent of the Trunic language written in the game, hiding the ‘words’ throughout the Tunic soundtrack. Here are some examples:
Anyway! “Tuneic” is displayed throughout the game.
Sounds in the UI, like when you start a new game: pic.twitter.com/HQRzi9apgj
– Kevin Regamey (@regameyk) October 20, 2022
Looking for a secret that directs your attention: pic.twitter.com/rSYhBvAXbj
– Kevin Regamey (@regameyk) October 20, 2022
And of course, the door on the mountain: pic.twitter.com/QvJ5HFop7L
– Kevin Regamey (@regameyk) October 20, 2022
We have ranked Ao Dai among our own favorite game of 2022 so far back in the summer. Brendy (RPS in Peace) thinks the game is a lovely homage to the classic Zelda games in Review of Ao Dai. “If this unlucky fox fakes too much, it’s only because he checked all his references. Like a protruding camera view, Tunic sees Zelda from top to bottom. It is a well-paid dedication. ”
Ao Dai is on Steam, GOGand Epic game store for £25 / $30 / €28 and you can also play it on Game Pass if you are a subscriber.
