Tunic’s manual pages — scattered throughout the world, ostensibly a guide to the game’s mechanics — are written in the Faun language, which uses a runic-looking script that appears decorative. It is not decorative. It is a full constructed writing system built by designer Andrew Shouldice, and it can be read by mapping its characters to English letters.
The language decoding was completed by the community within days of release. The translated manual reveals the game’s full mechanical layer — items, enemies, secrets — but also contains a thread of narrative about what the fox protagonist is actually doing and what the world used to be.
The deepest manual translation — achievable only with the full manual assembled, which requires finding all pages — describes the endgame in terms that reframe the game’s visual language completely. The gold door that ends the standard campaign is not an exit. The page translation explains what it actually is.
Shouldice built a constructed language, hid it in plain sight as design decoration, and put the game’s most important information inside it. The language was fully decodable from materials available in the first hour of the game.
The attention to detail the developers put into this is insane. Most players will never see it but it makes the world feel so much richer.
This is the kind of discovery that keeps communities alive for years. Well documented.