In the game Stray, there was a fake cyberpunk alphabet that chapter titles were printed in. As it turns out, there was a one-to-one relationship with the English alphabet, so all I had to do was find enough translated text that I could start building a cypher to decode the rest of it. It didn’t take me long; I had it figured out the day the game launched.
I’ve been playing Asterigos: Curse of the Stars lately, which has its own coded alphabet. So once again, I put my decoding skills to the test. As it turns out, there are two versions of this alphabet: one is handwritten, while the other is a Times New Roman-style font. They’re both the same alphabet, though. (I’ll show you both of them in just a bit.)
Decoding all this was even easier in Asterigos than in Stray, because there’s way more translated text in the game. For example, there’s a whole journal in the menu, which you can automatically translate by pressing the X button (on PS4/PS5).
However, like in Stray, there are a few places where the translation was a bit rough, which threw me off a bit. For example, let’s zoom in on that second paragraph in the image above.
The actual text is a bit strange. Instead of reading exactly as in the translated version, the first line of this block of text actually says:
- Weapons means lives for us
In case you’re curious, the rest of it reads, line by line:
- Northwind Legion every
- piece is enchanted these
- little critters do have an
- excellent taste don t they
So as you can see, it’s not perfect. However, enough of the text was close enough that I was able to put together a cypher. I apologize, because I’m definitely not a graphic designer, but here’s what I came up with:
I also created a cypher for the Times New Roman-style font, so I just added that to the bottom of that image. As you can see, they’re just two different styles of writing, but the letters are all the same.
But now that we’re armed with the full alphabet, it’s time to start translating some of the graffiti in the game. If you’ve played through the Black Streets area, then you’ve certainly seen tons and tons of graffiti. If you’re like me, you probably wanted to know what it said. Well, let’s take a look!
What better place to start than the graffiti shown at the top of this article?
This is a little hard to read, because some of the letters are pretty scribbly, but I think it says, “Archon cowards make u saw doomed.”
Okay, how about the one that has a lion drawing next to it?
This one says, “Baraad is roaring.” And then the text below it says “Roar.” So I guess that’s not a lion, but a badly drawn picture of Baraad, the Lord of the Black Streets.
Okay, those were fun, but I have a feeling this next one’s going to be a bit more serious.
This one says, “Kill me I dont want to be a monster dont want to be a…” Well yikes, that got dark, didn’t it?
Okay, so let’s do a lighter one again. The explosive bags of flour:
Those say “Doomed,” which I guess scans. If you’re standing next to one of those when it ignites, well, you’re pretty much a goner.
Now let’s check out this wanted poster.
The top portion says “Wanted,” obviously, but it’s split in two, so it actually says “Wan ted” with a little V thing in the middle. The rest of it says: “Mystery man at large,” which honestly wasn’t what I was expecting.
This one has a lot going on, but I can read most of it:
Okay, so the first part says, “Waraxe ___ Baraad, but I can’t really make out the middle word. The black text painted over it says “AWESOME” which is kind of funny.
I think I found this next one in the sewers:
The first line says, “No gods for…” and I legitimately can’t read the rest. There are too many letters I can’t quite read, and the ones I can don’t seem to make much sense.
How about this one:
This one’s not as bad as the previous one, and as far as I can tell, it says: “No more oppression god has abandoned us.”
Now, one I’ve been super curious about is the tattoo on the backs of the beefy guard dudes.
Part of it is covered up, but the part that’s showing is pretty legible. But those don’t seem to make any sense. Okay, so the first letter is covered up, but the second is clearly an O. But after that you have an S that’s turned sideways, then OR and another letter that’s covered up. The next line is O, followed by two letters that I don’t really know, followed by RE, then another letter I don’t know, and then the rest is too covered up to see. I kind of feel like it’s supposed to say “NO MORE OPPRESSION,” But too many of the letters just aren’t right. It’s possible this is another language, or maybe it’s just an earlier version of the alphabet that was later refined and used in the game. I’m not really sure what happened here.
So yeah, there you go. I’ve deciphered another video-game language.
