2022’s action‑adventure titleTunicseems to pride itself on just how many secrets it can hide in plain sight. Countless shortcuts hidden by the camera, secret combos, and a bite‑sized spellcasting system: all those mechanics are available from the start, butplayers won’t discover them until much later.
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Even if they’re accessible from the very start, those are some of themost well-hidden secrets in all video games. While some are just hard puzzles that are still clearly signposted, many are simply impossible to predict unless you decide to run the whole game through a spectrogram. These are the real secrets ofTunic, the ones that fly over the head of all but the most dedicated players.
10The Secret Language
MostTunicplayers eventually realize that the fictional language used all over the game and the in-game manual isn’t just gibberish, but could theoretically be translated. Still, many never figured out how the language works exactly andhow one could possibly figure out a translation.
Tunic’s runic language (or, as fans call it, Trunic) is based on written phonetic English. Each Trunic character represents a phoneme, consonant sounds being the inside of each rune and the vowel sounds being a character’s “frame”. Usually it’s vowel then consonant, but a small circle can be added to the bottom of a character to make it consonant, then vowel.
9The Mountain Door And The Golden Path
Though this puzzle is mandatory for the secret ending, there are certainly some players who never figured it out completely. This puzzle requires an understanding of the Holy Cross' secret input method and a propensity forThe Witnessstyle puzzles.
Once players have all but 2 of the pages of the in-game manual, they must look at page 49: each of the numbers found on here hints at a different page of the manual. There, they must find a gold line and place that line in the relative slot on the Golden Path page.
8Magic Wand + Magic Dagger
During their adventure,Tunicplayers will find lots ofconsumable itemsas well as a few unique ones. Some of those items have a clear use case, like the Grapple Hook or the Rifle. Some others don’t seem to have any use at all until they’re combined.
The Magic Wand shoots weak projectiles at a not insignificant SP cost, while the Dagger freezes enemies, but at a laughably short distance. Combining those items by using them at the same time causes the Magic Wand’s projectile to freeze enemies from a safe distance.
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7Grapple Hook + Frozen Enemies
Tunichas some items whose effects can be combined by using them together. A powerful and useful combination is the Magic Wand and Magic Dagger, to freeze enemies from a distance.
The Grapple Hook is an item (possibly a tiny Being Of The Fare Shore) that allows the fox protagonist to zoom between the tuning forks placed all over the overworld. On top of moving the player around, it also works on enemies, dragging them towards the player. Alternatively, if the enemies are frozen, they will stay still and allow the player to reach areas otherwise inaccessible.
6Customize Your Fox!
The fox protagonist ofTunicwears a green tunic and pink scarf reminiscent of the classic look ofLink, fromThe Legend of Zeldaseries. Not many players know that this look is widely customizable, from the clothes, the fox’s fur, and even the eyes. This is done through a room full of folding screens and bells below the overworld by a secret passage.
Passing behind one of the folding screens will change one aspect of the fox. Other than the four screens in the center of the room there is a hidden one, to the very left, that modifies hair color. Fans haven’t figured out yet what the bells and the conspicuous rectangle in the center of the room do.
5"Egg!", An Almost Easter Egg
Tunichas a decent amount of easter eggs, or rather, “egg!”s. The game hides a handful of interactable locations, presumably invisible items, all over its overworld and dungeons. Unlike the name seems to imply, those aren’t references to other games or anything one would normally call an easter egg.
Interacting with those things doesn’t do anything but spawn a line of text in the game’s secret language, just like the one that accompanies the discovery of new items. Instead of naming or describing what the player just found, the translated text only reads “Egg!”.
460 Seconds Underwater
Some puzzles inTunicare even harder than the ones required for thesecret ending. This is the case of the two secrets of Page 51, which require players to understand the secret language of the game and to be able to solve two clever riddles.
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Being one of the few puzzles to speak the runic language ofTunic, the actual hint is fairly simple. Once translated, the hint recites:Did you retain the secret letter from us? Immerse it in water for 60 seconds to see a secret message.This means that players will need to stay put with their feet in the water for 60 seconds to see the real and much more difficult puzzle.
3The softest feather
Part two of Page 51’s puzzle is found in a previously empty spot at the start of the manual:the softest feather; corrected eleven times; departed once more. Most players can’t even solve the original puzzle, which only requires to understandTunic’s secret language. Not only does this one need to be translated too, but it’s a proper riddle.
Its solution is: down x1 (“down” is the softest feather of a bird), right x11 (“corrected” means being “right”), left x11 (“departed” means to have “left”, once more is one more than the previous clue).
2The Eyes Of The Far Shore
Finding at least 6 secret treasures grants access to a teleport in the Old House to what fans are calling the Glyph Tower. The hint for this puzzle is on page 54 of the in-game manual. Once translated, the hint says:“Find some rare gold statues. Traverse the glow to visit 12 strange beings. ‘Un‑sing’ to them the greatest song, the song of the Golden Path, as seen from within.”
This is likely the hardest puzzle in the whole game. The rare gold statues are the secret treasures, while the strange glowing beings can be seen on top of the Glyph Tower. To un-sing the Golden Path from within means, instead, to input the Golden Path as seen from the other side of the screen and starting from the end (un‑sing). Doing this will create a message leading to the website www.doyoufeartheeyesofthefarshore.
1The Other Secret Language
Once fans reached the websitewww.doyoufeartheeyesofthefarshore.co, fans started thinking that the game could contain a fully-fledged ARG. Running the song playing on the website through a spectrogram they discovered indentations in the form of the game’s ruins and some curious arpeggios, both unlikely to just be part of the music.
This audio file turned out to be the last big secret of the game: a Rosetta Stone for the second hidden language of the game. The language was called Tuneic, from tune andTunic. All over the soundtrack and in the sound game’s effects, keen players found words, sentences, and even a minutes‑long speech in Tuneic, hidden in plain sight.
Tunicis available on PC, macOS, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
