Decoding the Secret Language of Stray

A very talented viewer that goes by Starscope has updated my font by cleaning up the linework, adding a stroked version for lowercase, tidying up the metadata, and including the numbers found in later chapters! The new link is included below, and you can check out Starscope's twitter at twitter.com/whostarscope drive.google.com/file/d/1I03l8VHoQyR39bjghjrkd_fmP…

You know you've watched too many Stray playthroughs when you can start automatically translating the robot language without even using a font chart 😄

I can confidently said that this channel is severely underrated

So 2 quick things: 1. I'm sure other people have solved this in the time it took for me to create this video 2. Not everything in this game seems to have a coherent translation Regardless, I hope you still find this cipher to be an interesting topic. This is another slight departure from my usual content, so any feedback on the content, style, or choice of subject will be greatly appreciated. As always, thank you so much for watching!

Thanks for making this cipher. Now I can make a t-shirt for my kids using the fonts. They really love this game.

Anyone else got this recommend to them a year later?

This is wonderful, thank you for taking the time to decode and recreate this! It seems like a lot of the stuff in this game is upside down or flipped and I’m wondering if since many of the devs wouldn’t have English as their first language, they either wrote some things in French or fiddled about with spelling for fun or to reference in-jokes (like maybe someone on the team pronounced wanted like “vanted”, being German or Eastern-European etc, and they put that in as a laugh). It’s SO cool to have a reference point for delving into more secrets in the game now!! Thank you!

So the text on the tv "Would you like to know more? " is an Easter Egg referencing the movie Starship Troopers. Also the sheet music song "Cool Down" is a rendition of 'Counting Stars', a song made by the Japanese composer Nujabes. And I think the 'Entrance' reversal is a developer goof; they probably redesigned the level and did precisely what V-limit did and flip the asset horizontally rather than re-make it!

instead of "dental" it could be "rental" maybe? the companions/robots mimic humans yes but i think it may make more sense for it to say "rental" since companions are pretty lacking in the tooth department haha, either way it's fun to have an alternate letter! really makes you wonder why it's there; developer oversight? unique worldbuilding? a sound only the companions have come up with? i saw these letters but always assumed they'd just translate to gibberish or be untranslatable at all (like they might not have consistent patterns like languages do and whatnot), it's awesome that you translated them and that they do, in fact, say stuff! thank you soldier for your hard work o7

My theory on why the cat character, who I like to call Stray, can survive that kind of impact, is because over the thousands and thousands of years cats have evolved to become far more intelligent as well as being able to heal faster, which explains why Stray is able to follow the story of the game in an intelligent manner despite their species seeming to have not evolved over the thousands of years like most things have. Cats have evolved, just not visibly so

When I found the chart for the language, I immedetly studied. it took me an actual day to be able to read and write the Companions language. Wish i could speak it tho~

It actually makes some sense for U, V, and W to be a bit confusing and used oddly by the Companions. These letters have an interesting historical relationship and, in fact, we today say "double-u" when we mean "w", though that letter in most fonts is quite literally represented as a "double-v". 'U' and 'V' are interchanged in some languages and in Latin were the same letter 'v' differentiated by their use as a consonant or vowel; context determined the pronunciation. As 'v' became the sound "va", it later became necessary to represent the "wa" sound and this could be done with either "uu" or "vv", which thus gives us the confusing "double-u" that is normally typed as 'w' and handwritten as "uu". In modern English, "double-u" has a poor meaning, in my opinion, as we cannot use this sound as a vowel. It would be more linguistically accurate to call it a "double-v". People don't like it when I do that, however ;). It's interesting that the word "weather" in the game has the 'w' removed entirely instead of simply replaced with 'v' as might be expected. I wonder if this was intentional or a typo. "vanted", on the other hand, seems reasonable considering historical context. Readers are encouraged to look this information up for themselves as I am not a linguist. 'Y' is also related to u, v, and w, but appears unrelated in Companion language and thus not relevant here.

I think the weird misuse of the alphabet like eather or vanted is just actually a typo. The game designer probably made a font out of this language symbols and created a bunch of objects with that font without really memorizing the actual "alpahabet" it's probably easy to mistype some words and not noticing it. They probably thought that no one would go into too much trouble to decipher it anyway. But overall, great job! Great video!

Honestly after a little bit of playing around, id genuinely be interested in using your deciphered font in some posters I design. Regardless, this is genuinely impressive, and weather there ever is an expanded or fully developed font/font-family published, this is genuineley really cool. I say in perspective as a graphic designer always looking at new ways to get creative with my designs. Lastly, Thank you and big ups for the decipher.

My playthrough would have been like twice as long if I was trying to decide everything along the way! While I didn't decrypt the robot language, I did find something sort of neat. At some point in one of the early chapters, you get a postcard of the outside. On the back of it, you can see it was actually used as a postcard, with an entire letter written. It mentions the city of Montpelier in France as the presumed location of the photo of the beach, and also has the address of the recipient, which I think might be a real place in Dallas Texas. However I wasn't really able to make out the exact address, and when I checked Google maps I only got some random locations, one that was just under a bridge. Anyways, thought it was interesting

I'd love to see a story breakdown of Stray. Like the backstory and lore.

The amount of hardship you did just to decode some fancy imaginary fonts is beyond imagination! Thank you over 3000!

That ‘please’ after asking us to subscribe was too hard to resist. Good vid man

I have yet to find another individual so well versed in lore as you. Whatever you choose I will likely be watching it.

You can’t ask for us to decipher things when you put them in a tidy little red box. Great video, V! This world seem to have a lot of details and even though people already decoded it, it’s fun to do it on your own :)