Tunic: The Old Game and the Language Underneath

Tunic’s Faun language cipher — once decoded — reveals that the manual is written from the perspective of someone who has played the game many times before. The narrator of the manual is not a character inside the game’s world; the manual’s ‘you’ addresses a player, and the manual’s tone acknowledges deaths, retries, and experimentation in ways that make no sense from an in-universe document.

The manual is a player writing to a future player. Or a version of the fox writing to a future version of themselves. The temporal framing of the manual’s narrator is ambiguous in the decoded text — they describe events in future tense that the game has shown the player in past tense.

Andrew Shouldice confirmed in a GDC talk that the manual’s narrator was designed to be temporally indeterminate — someone who has experienced the game but exists in a relationship to time that is not straightforward. The decoded text contains two lines that are addressed specifically to the decoder: acknowledging that they put in the effort to translate, and saying it was worth it.