How Players Cracked the Invented Alphabets Hidden in Games

Some games print a sign in a language nobody speaks, and dare you to read it. Most players walk past. A small group copies every glyph into a spreadsheet, and within days or weeks, the alphabet falls. Then the sign says something, and sometimes that something rewrites how people understand the whole game.

I spent years writing code for a living before writing about games, and what fascinates me about these community decodings is how ordinary the methods are. Nobody needs a supercomputer. They need patience, careful transcription and a few techniques that predate computers by centuries. Here is how several invented game scripts were actually cracked, and one that still has not been.

Why most game alphabets are easier than they look

Designers who invent a script usually want it to be solvable. That shapes how they build it. The vast majority of game alphabets are simple substitution ciphers: each made-up glyph stands for one letter of English or Japanese, word breaks are preserved, and the underlying text is ordinary prose.

Preserved word breaks are a gift to a decoder. In English, a one letter word is almost always "a" or "I". A three letter word that appears constantly is very likely "the". Once "the" is pinned down, every other word containing those three glyphs suddenly has known letters in it, and guessing the rest becomes a crossword.

The second gift is frequency. In ordinary English text, the letter E makes up roughly 12 to 13 percent of letters, followed by T, A and O. Count every glyph in a game's signs, sort by frequency, and the top few almost always line up with those letters, as long as the sample is large enough. With fewer than a couple of hundred glyphs, frequency counts become unreliable, which is why decoders always start by collecting as much text as possible.

The cribs that cracked famous scripts

Codebreakers call a known piece of plaintext a crib. Games are full of them, because the same name appears in a sign and in a menu, or a glyph string sits right under a picture of an obvious object.

In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Hylian script seen on signs and buildings turned out to be a direct substitution for English letters. Players matched repeated glyph strings to place names they already knew from the map, and the alphabet came together quickly. After that, hundreds of signs across Hyrule became readable, mostly mundane shop names, with a few jokes tucked in.

FEZ, released in 2012, had its own alphabet visible on walls throughout the world. Players cracked the basic letter mapping within days of release by matching glyphs to recurring words. The far harder puzzle in FEZ was not the alphabet but its final secret, the black monolith, which resisted every logical attempt for many months. In the end players solved it by brute force, trying every possible input combination, which tells you something about how the designer hid that one.

Tunic, where the alphabet was not an alphabet

Tunic, released in 2022, broke the usual rules, and that is why its decoding is my favourite case. Its script, which players named Trunic, looks like a substitution cipher at first glance. It is not. Each glyph represents a syllable built from a consonant sound and a vowel sound, drawn as two overlapping sets of lines, with a small circle showing which sound comes first.

Early attempts using letter frequency failed completely, because there were far more distinct glyphs than English has letters. The breakthrough came when players realised they were looking at sounds rather than spellings, closer to the International Phonetic Alphabet than to Latin letters. Once that clicked, community members built full charts within a few weeks of release.

The design was clever for a reason that goes beyond difficulty. Tunic hides much of its story and its instruction manual in that script, and a player who learns it reads the game differently. The game rewards decoders with understanding rather than a trophy, which is the same principle we discussed in why game clues work best when players feel clever.

Comparing the cases

The one that still holds out

Noita, a roguelike released in full in 2020, contains a set of messages written in patterns of eye symbols. Its community has thrown everything at them: frequency analysis, transposition attempts, comparisons with historical ciphers, and long running shared spreadsheets. The messages have unusual statistical properties that suggest they are not random, but no proposed solution has been accepted.

I want to be careful here. I cannot tell you whether the eye messages are solvable, a deliberate dead end, or an encrypted message with a key hidden somewhere nobody has looked. Anyone who claims to know for sure is guessing. That uncertainty is part of the appeal, and it keeps a community going years later, much like the long hunts we covered in how players uncover secrets through teamwork.

How to approach an unknown script yourself

If you run into an invented script in a game, the methods that worked above are worth following in order:

• Transcribe everything before you guess. Screenshot every sign, label each glyph with a code like G1, G2, and keep a running text file. Decoding from memory leads to errors that cost days.
• Look for cribs first. Any glyph string near a recognisable name, picture or menu item is worth more than a hundred counted glyphs.
• Count distinct glyphs early. Around 26 suggests English letters. Many more suggests syllables or sounds, as in Tunic. Far fewer may mean a numeric code.
• Check whether the game is localised. Some scripts encode English in every region, others change with the language setting, which can give you a second crib for free. Our piece on how localization hides jokes across languages shows how much changes between versions.

Puzzles that spill out of the game and into the real world use many of the same tools, and alternate reality games are a good next step if you enjoy this kind of work.

Start a glyph sheet tonight

Pick one game you own that uses a made-up script, even a single sign. Screenshot every instance you can find this week, number each distinct glyph, and count them. That count alone will tell you which kind of script you are facing, and it is exactly the first step every successful decoding above began with.