Madame Zora's Cipher
After having busted my huge stupendous ass over this game and it's mystery, I finally figured out Madame Zora's Cipher. Here's how I did it. At first, her dialogue looks like total random keystrokes:
"... q | wx m dw 'w d px "
". | o wx wx m v d d v x "
The dev (love u dev) actually confirmed that this is an intentional cipher and not just random decor! MWUAHHAHA. Under the hood, the game uses custom upside-down and flipped Unicode glyphs.
Once you un-flip all the mirrored characters back into standard English letters, the hidden raw string turns into this:
Line 1: pnlacd knlcjw' jwdjmn xwn llqn...
Line 2: vlatd dcivynm xw xwn olln...
This was step 1. Step 2... *ominous thunder crack* Now, once the letters are right-side up, it becomes a classic letter-swap code. Here's how the pieces fell into place folks: The Anchor Word (xwn): In English, a 3-letter word sitting before nouns like llqn or olln is almost always "one".
soooo,
x = o
w = n
n = e
The Contraction (knlcjw'): An 8-letter word ending in an apostrophe right after our w (n) means an "in"" ending. That gives us "beatin'"
k = b
l = a
c = t
j = i
Now, plugging those letters into the remaining words solved the puzzle:
pnlacd -> hearts
jwdjmn -> inside
llqn -> cage
vlatd -> marks
dcivynm -> stamped
olln -> face
So the overall decoded message is something like:
"...hearts beatin' inside one cage..."
"...marks stamped on one face."
THE LORE IMPLICATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When you pair this text with Madame Zora's infamous line, "There's two of you, boy," it practically confirms the host theory:
"Two hearts beatin' inside one cage" -> Cain's physical body is literally a cage holding two separate souls/entities. Perhaps perchance permaybe.
"Two marks stamped on one face" -> Refers directly to Cain's facial mark/scar and his split identity.
Part of me feels like Cain has something living in him that gives him his inhuman qualities such as him being able to stand in abominable unbearable heat head to toe in basically winter's attire and his ability to stay awake for 4 days and look relatively alive. Not to mention Madame Zora saying his literal flesh is lying to her. Like his physical body is some sort of shield or veil for the twin flames within him. And Cain himself is 100% aware of this. The question here is...what's inside of him...pause no pause resume.
What do you guys think? Let me know in them comments. I'm genuinely so interested in what this game has to offer story wise.
BUT HEYYYY, that's JUST a theory. A GAMEEEEE THEORY...thanks for reading.
