The interfaces of videogame travel

Foreword: this text was first published as part of Point’n Think’s Kaleidoscope newsletter, in August 2024, dedicated to || UNKNOWN LANGUAGES || . The version below has undergone very slight alterations and corrections. Enjoy your reading.

Before the Word, there was the Line. The integrity of infinite straight lines, the interweaving of lines, the spiral of curves. Drawing was born to express ideas, concepts or objects. Thanks to this extreme simplification of reality, Man could communicate without having to speak. From these tracings, the whole universe could be transfigured on parchment, the walls of a cave or between the grains of sand on a beach. It was easy to show the world at your fingertips: a circle could easily embody the sun, a wavy line the waves of the ocean, before more complex shapes gave birth to elements that were just as complex, such as trees, handicrafts and animals.

However, over the centuries, humans accumulated more and more knowledge and created, then tamed, systems essential to their evolution. Lines and curves had to represent increasingly sophisticated concepts, such as numeral systems, vital needs or abstract concepts. For example, the lines that embodied simple ideas became counters: one line for “one”, two lines for “two”, three lines for “three”, and so on. Soon, sounds themselves were converted into drawings. Soon, Man was reading and writing.

It’s impossible to sum up in this place the crazy story of the birth of language and writing, but it’s also impossible to deny its essentiality. It’s through this interface that I’m communicating with you today. And it’s this same interface that will interest us here, through its use in the medium that brings us together: video games. If we were to summarize the way this medium interacts with its audience, we could isolate three major axes: visuals (i.e. graphics, soundtrack, art direction, menus, etc.), gameplay (the way our gestures create action in the game) and text.

Some works border on the limits of this ludic concept, such as visual novels, which only ask players to make a few choices at key moments in the story, as in Slay the Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023) or the Gyakuten Saiban saga (Capcom). In this case, the main interface is obviously represented by the art direction and above all the text, because of its ability to weave an atmosphere and immerse users in its universe. To the detriment of the gameplay, which simply consists of moving a cursor to select the actions to be performed. However, unlike the other two, the text-based interface raises a major problem: it’s not universal.

For a story to immerse its audience, it obviously has to be understandable. Not mastering Japanese and embarking on a visual novel that has never been translated into another language would be complete nonsense for anyone not fluent in Haruki Murakami’s language. And beyond the story, while it’s still possible to enjoy a game’s gameplay, it’s also essential to understand how it works and its subtleties thanks to the various tutorials. How do you equip your character with spells and weapons in a game you understand nothing about, except by experimenting, step by step, try after try?

These days, Triple A employs translators who are more and more demanding in terms of cost and time resources, as each new release seems to push back the limit of text characters present in their scripts. Translating around a million words into several languages for Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) must have been no mean feat. Sometimes, developers opt for full dubbing, as CD Projekt Red does, while on other occasions only the subtitles are adapted into another language, as Rockstar does for its flagship sagas Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. In these cases, translation is an investment, as it enables a wider audience to potentially purchase the game in question. However, a text interface is not essential for every video game.

There are some games that could be described as “gameplay” games, where understanding the text has no bearing on the experience, since it’s all about carrying out actions with the sole aim of completing a challenge with clear, well-defined objectives, or even accumulating a maximum number of points. Such is the case with bullet hell, those famous shooters of ever-greater proportions, or the timeless Tetris. However, in these examples, there’s no question of conveying a story, only the gameplay and the thrill of the actions to be performed. This brings us to a final category of games that has set itself the goal of telling stories universally, putting everyone on an equal footing: games without language, and even games that don’t hesitate to create their own.

2012 saw the release of Journey (thatgamecompany and SIE Santa Monica Studio), a journey with crystal-clear rules. The avatar wakes up in a desert bathed in light, the camera points to a mountain on the horizon, and within seconds players understand what they have to do. What was special about this epic was that the game brought together two individuals, from anywhere on the globe, who could help each other but not speak to each other. Only more or less intense singing served as a catalyst for expression. And at the end of the experience, the disappearance of the Other was a real heartbreak. A simple error in connection would separate the two companions for eternity. This simplicity encouraged reflection on the notion of solitude, travel and solidarity.

The story was told through the adventures of the players, but also via illustrated frescoes, similar to a picture book that had to be glued together to form a timeline of the events that had shaken this world. But other games go even further, inventing their own rules of communication. In doing so, each player learns the basics and subtleties from scratch. So, instead of teaching a gameplay mechanic in successive stages, as The Witness would do (Jonathan Blow, 2016), these games allow you to discover a language mechanic. This is exactly what TUNIC (Andrew Shouldice, 2022) does.

TUNIC tells us so much, with so little. To fully understand this approach, we need to look at the game through the prism of the three interfaces mentioned above. The most obvious, and logical, is the visual interface. Through its isometric viewpoint on this three-dimensional world, the game easily evokes the icons of the genre, led by The Legend of Zelda. It’s hard not to see this little fox as an animal iteration of Link, so similar are the game’s basic control mechanisms. And it’s hard not to think of the dreamlike episode in Nintendo’s famous franchise, Link’s Awakening (Nintendo EAD, 1993), when this fox cub awakens on an island on the edge of the world. However, the treatment given to the environment is modernized by technology, of course, lending the game a melancholy charm, but also by its soundtrack, which clearly stands out from the style of the musical beats composed at the time.

TUNIC is a game that summons nostalgia, but doesn’t embrace it. Sublimated by the many secrets hidden behind the pixels, this setting is conducive to exploration and discovery in a way like no other. Indeed, the second and third interfaces – gameplay and text – are intrinsically linked here. At the start of a game of TUNIC, absolutely nothing is clearly indicated: neither the character’s handling, nor the main objective. It’s only through trial and error that the fox’s destiny takes shape, as players accumulate pages from a torn booklet.

This booklet, which can be consulted at any time during the game, emulates the practice, now consigned to the limbo of videogame history, of accompanying game cartridges or discs with a small manual serving as a prologue to the experience. Even before clicking on the much-desired “New Game”, the game adventurers of the last century could lose themselves in the universe of the game they were about to launch, simply by surveying the lines of text that covered these manuals, or even by contemplating the design of the creatures they were going to slaughter a little later. Developers and publishers sometimes took the opportunity to create micro-encyclopedias, glossaries and even complete cartographies of the worlds they had imagined.

These supplements also had the advantage of detailing story elements that were not specified during the game, in order to save memory space on the various media. The advent of the digital age has, of course, led to the demise of these manuals, although some modern publishers still rely on this timeless charm, publishing special or limited editions of their productions. TUNIC, then, emulates these manuals within its interfaces (the game’s special edition features a physical reproduction of this booklet), with each page unearthed during exploration revealing the existence of secrets and hidden commands. Precision is essential here: you don’t find a new power while playing TUNIC, you just discover its existence.

Like the most advanced moves in the fantastic platform game Celeste (originally released by Matt Makes Games, 2018), the techniques that the fox can master are already present at the start of the game. However, this knowledge is hidden from the audience behind the discovery of those famous manual pages, but also behind language that is incomprehensible at the start of the game. So, while there are signs and inscriptions here and there, it’s initially impossible to decipher their meaning. A marvellous game of search then begins between TUNIC and its audience, the latter having just realized that they’ve stepped into a rabbit hole that will take them much further than a simple Link’s Awakening clone ever could.

If when it comes to talking about TUNIC, its manual is quickly brought to the fore, it’s not because the game itself isn’t interesting – far from it. On the contrary, by modernizing game design concepts that are almost half a century old, but also by happily drawing on the most recent advances in the medium (including the “campfire” system democratized through souls-like games), the adventure proves to be rich and thrilling. However, it’s the booklet that really sets it apart from most of its compatriots, at least in terms of originality. The reason for this is quite simple: in addition to the nostalgic aspects mentioned above, TUNIC’s manual contains the three interfaces presented above.

As well as offering its own codes and making direct reference to several works from the history of the medium, its visual interface is intimately linked to the textual interface (via the glyphs used to represent the game’s language) and the gameplay interface (through numerous hints and other indications of the actions to be performed to progress). In integrating this virtual manual, Andrew Shouldice not only emulated his childhood memories, but also tried to reproduce their sense of discovery. And so, page after page, players will piece together the various sheets scattered across the playing field in a haphazard fashion. Sometimes a page can’t be understood without finding its partner, while at other times cross-references point to as yet unknown pages.

Sometimes illustrations are actually visual clues to in-game gameplay manipulations. Or lines of text, in glyph form, may actually represent a list of items to be found. In short, the manual is not just a booklet to be pored over for pleasure, it is in fact an indispensable tool for discovering all the game’s secrets. TUNIC is not, of course, a forerunner in this field, as other games have already explored the idea of relying on a book created for the occasion. Copies of Ni no Kuni: Shikkoku no Madoushi (Level-5 and Studio Ghibli, 2010) were accompanied by a reproduction of the grimoire used by the main character in the game, containing, among other things, a compendium, numerous illustrations and explanations of the world created for the occasion, as well as the various runes to be traced to cast spells (to be reproduced with the Nintendo DS stylus). However, while the Ni no Kuni grimoire is a charming accessory, it’s still just that: an accessory. TUNIC makes the booklet an indispensable gameplay element in the progression of the game.

In reality, we’re not all equal when it comes to video games. Depending on our experience, our knowledge of game design, our skill, our method of thinking, and many other parameters, we will not react in the same way to a given game. A player accustomed to action games will be quick to notice scenery elements likely to serve as barricades, and will be able to anticipate the appearance of enemies in a room that will quickly become a combat arena. A metroidvania expert will guess in advance that a particular path will lead to a boss, by its singularity or the atypical aspect of the room he’s about to reach. A master platformer will traverse the early levels of Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze (Retro Studio, Monster Games and Nintendo SPD, 2014) with skill. A head-shot god will traverse the trendy new FPS in a flash. However, faced with a booklet full of clues and dressed in an unfamiliar language, everyone will have to adapt. Admittedly, fans of enigmas, escape games and other treasure hunts will have a slight advantage, but the incredible thing about the mechanics is that it forces its audience to play by new rules. That’s why we had to insist on the importance and originality of this manual, without which TUNIC wouldn’t really be TUNIC.

However, the TUNIC manual isn’t the only attraction the game has to offer – far from it. In addition to various narrative surprises and other game design tricks, Shouldice’s dreamlike universe takes the trouble to expose a language entirely created for the occasion. The game’s director asserts that, here too, the enigmatic glyphs that make up this unknown language are merely an echo of his past experiences. Reminiscent of a more or less distant era, a time when we played games without even being able to understand them (and even more so when they were imported or had no translation in the language of Molière), TUNIC’s runes sound like so many locks on a door just about to open. According to Shouldice, TUNIC is more than an adventure game; it’s a gigantic mystery, fragmented into a multitude of enigmas and secrets, where each step brings us closer to a solution, while posing new questions. It’s precisely this feeling that lies at the heart of the experience as conceived by the developer: that wonderful state of floating that arises when the rules of a still hazy world begin to reveal themselves little by little.

The TUNIC writing system is unique. While graphically it may evoke Nordic runes, in reality it’s a single six-sided shape broken down into two parts. The first half, made up of the lines forming the outline of the figure, designates a vowel, while the inner lines represent a consonant. By combining the two halves, the glyph embodies a sound. Unlike ideograms, which designate concepts and objects, or the letters of the Latin alphabet, the game’s writing system is actually built on an association of phonemes. This language, however, is not intended to be immediately translated by players; in fact, it serves more as a wrapper. As Shouldice again points out, confronting the audience with incomprehensible runes encourages the feeling of being a stranger in this world. Unlike Link’s Awakening, in which the eponymous hero remains guided by the island’s inhabitants, despite the exoticism, the fox feels like a stranger in these hostile and esoteric lands. These runes, when seen in the textbook, don’t provide the key to understanding the page being studied. On the contrary, they add to the mystery and strangeness of the playful universe.

However, and this is another stroke of genius on Shouldice’s part, TUNIC’s language is not only deployed through the manual or the various signs posted along the fox’s path, it is also expressed through the game interface. When the player picks up a new object or performs an action, the text appears in “Runic Renardian”. The excitement of discovering a weapon or artifact is accompanied by a strange discomfort of incomprehension. To discover and understand the effects of an object, there’s no choice but to test it, use it and experiment with it. What’s more, unlike the Zelda games, the avatar embodied throughout the adventure is not humanoid. Playing as an animal forges a new barrier between the TUNIC universe and those who lose themselves in it, making the whole even more enigmatic. What’s more, deciphering the runes isn’t done with the help of objects to be found during the game, as in Final Fantasy X via the Al Bhed (here, each letter corresponds to another, and is automatically translated as Tidus discovers new translation tools).

In our case, deciphering this language requires a real effort, even transcending the limits of the game. Like the experiences offered by games such as Animal Well (Shared Memory, 2024) or FEZ (Polytron Corporation, 2012), a community has quickly formed around TUNIC, with the aim of unlocking its most tenuous secrets. The different languages present in the game, which act as barriers to be overcome in order to understand its various nuances, then became the building blocks of bridges formed between so many players around the globe. As a result, it is now possible to find spreadsheets and other websites entirely dedicated to an imaginary language. This language, which at first acts as a deterrent to understanding the world of gaming, has thus become a tool capable of bringing people together around the same thirst for learning.

While these two layers – the manual and the runes – rely on TUNIC’s visual interface, there’s another level of reading, this time concealed through the gameplay, and only revealed in the final part of the adventure. Like The Witness (Jonathan Blow, 2016), TUNIC saves one of its best assets for the final act, making its entire playground an essential mechanism of progression. Whereas in Blow’s masterpiece every landscape metamorphoses into a puzzle to be solved, TUNIC for its part emphasizes the use of the joystick’s directional cross (named here “Holy Cross”), which becomes the main interface for deciphering the epic’s final riddles. In so doing, Shouldice skilfully links form and content, making this historical button the essential artifact for solving the game’s greatest secrets. With touching nostalgia, he re-emphasizes the importance of the four directions that lulled the childhoods of millions of players. He re-emphasizes the fundamental essence of the interfaces linking gamers to video games.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Shouldice has made this element a sacred part of his name, as he seems to love – even revere – the infinite possibilities offered by the medium. So much so, in fact, that the various environmental puzzles exploit to the full the possibilities offered by what makes up the basis of a video game: whether it’s the scenery (a few flowers in a flowerbed), the objects (the embroidered motifs on a living-room carpet) or the animation (the reflections of water diffused on the wall of a cave), each stone in the playful cathedral is adorned with a new interpretation unsuspected at the outset. The effect created in the player echoes the sensations experienced in The Witness: despite the hours spent exploring this universe, the sensation of discovery is total.

There is, however, one interface that has not yet been mentioned: the game’s soundtrack. Early on in the game’s pre-production phase, the desire to highlight a new layer of enigmas through the soundscape was considered. Composers Terence Lee and Janice Kwan, along with audio designer Kevin Regamey, worked to create a coherent sound universe. So, without going into detail (due to a lack of musical knowledge), it appears that a certain number of the notes used to create TUNIC’s soundtrack refer to the runes in play, and therefore to the phonemes. But TUNIC doesn’t stop there. Shouldice amuses himself and us with videogame specificities, such as having to quit a game in progress to generate a unique save file needed to solve a puzzle. The developer tortures his audience by concealing in the game’s ethereal, cryptic soundtrack a myriad of clues as to the existence of a secret more obtuse than all the others put together. There’s the website that unveils a dark energy whose pulses set the pace for the construction of a new mystery. There are fairies and tro-fairies. And we might as well stop here, as the rest would be an endless enumeration of the innovative ideas that pepper the experience.

Shouldice’s life’s work is all about wonder. But not just any kind of wonder, the kind that upsets our expectations and shatters our certainties. The kind that, like a mouthful in Pixar Studios’ Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), grabs us by the collar and propels us back into the corridors of our childhood, when every stone left unturned, every wall cracked, every door sealed, embodied dreams, hopes and escapes. In addition to these contemporary mechanics, forged in the exciting history of a relatively young medium, TUNIC emulates those carefree fragments that peppered a simpler life still full of promise. An innovative amalgam of traditional rigor and a willingness to shake up the implicit rules that have shaped the evolution of video games, Shouldice’s creation stands out as an experience that has assimilated and digested the unique link between the various game interfaces and the players.

Sprinkled with a generous layer of passion and an unbridled love of the possibilities offered by the medium, the game designer has delivered one of those rare games that can pride itself on bringing with it an original, unique and spirited proposition. Fiery because it exploits each of its layers to create a complete experience, in which each micro-element of game design is meticulously studied. A kind of alchemical formula, where the slightest change in the dosage of ingredients would jeopardize the final result, TUNIC crystallizes a bygone era and philosophy which, for the space of a few hours, manages to overwhelm its audience with a magnificence rarely seen in video games.

And the best thing about this colorful adventure is that all this is only the beginning, TUNIC being an integral part of the democratization of a new genre capable of once again renewing the video game cosmos, or at least expanding it. Its borders (Note: several critics and Internet users already speak of “knowledgevania” or “metroidbrainia” to designate these games based on the assimilation of knowledge). By becoming the ambassador of a new genre of which the years to come will serve to build its codes, TUNIC is a miraculous experience which glorifies the very essence of our experiences with this media which fascinates us and drives us: language in video game.