I found one of those secret code things, I think!
[HEY ACTUALLY: After “solving” a bunch of this the nerdy way, I found out about a much simpler method, which I will detail at the bottom of the post.]
This won’t be too spoilery. You can find this portrait of Lionel pretty early in the game:
I thought the plaque at the bottom might say “- LIONEL -” since that one glyph appears in the first and sixth positions. But the game doesn’t have a whole lot of text like this to decipher, except in the newspapers:
And you can see how those paragraphs of text are really just two textures, flipped and rotated. But we’ll come back to this.
I also noticed this sign near a train station:
The shading makes it a little tricky, but you can recognize the I and E from LIONEL, in which case this says “?I??E??.” And, if none of the other letters are L, O, or N, then “TICKETS” is a likely candidate, since this is right by the entrance to a train station. The two Ts are different, but maybe they’re upper- and lower-case variants?
With guesses for L, I, O, N, E, T, C, K, and S, I went back to the two paragraphs that get flipped and rotated to serve as a sort of lorem ipsum in the newspapers. After flipping and rotating and making some more guesses, I found out what the newspapers say:
“THIS NEWSPAPER HAS LOTS OF USEFUL INFORMATION”; “USE THE NEWSPAPER AS HINTS FOR PLAYING THE GAME.” Excellent advice!
The uppercase T above does match the one on the “Tickets” sign, and now we see an uppercase U, which is like the lowercase U but with an extra pixel.
There’s another type of alphabet in this game, seen even more rarely. (Okay this part is kind of a spoiler. Not a huge one. It’s fine.) There’s reason to believe that the big word here is “DUCHESS”:
As far as I can tell, the smaller text is not using the same glyphs as the newspapers. It might be random pixels, but I notice the dates of birth and death begin with the same two “numbers.”
The cool thing is, the very tiny pixel “U” looks like a reduced version of this more detailed “U.” You can kind of say the same thing about the E, H, and S, but it’s not as obvious.
So, here’s how much of the Mina the Hollower cipher alphabet I have figured out based on these texts:
There are a couple more “big” letters in this newspaper ad:
I’m not sure what they’re big versions of, though. (UPDATE: it’s gotta be “T L.”)
UPDATE: Reddit user hippoqueenv mentioned that among the game’s many modifiers is an option for “hieroglyphic text” which encodes all dialog in this font:
With this knowledge, compiling a complete key to the cipher is just a matter of finding NPCs who happen to use all of the letters. These examples also show us some punctuation. Periods and exclamation marks use pixels below the letter baseline, but the question mark (after the blue words “Spark Generators”) in the Townspossum’s text) starts on the letter baseline and is four pixels tall, like a capital letter.
Compare this ad in the newspaper:
The text is in all caps, and I think antialiasing has been applied by hand, not totally consistently. I had thought it must read “SPEAKING TELEGRAPHY”, but now we see it must be “SPEAKING TELEGRAPH?” which is fun.
Having poked around some more, I’ve found all the letters except capital X. (Capital S and capital Y are the same glyph! I wonder if that’s on purpose.) I also found the numerals, thanks to Lena and some careful jumping. The way the numerals get printed makes it a little difficult to tell if I have 1/2/3/9 positioned correctly, but these are my best guesses.
Can we do anything else with this information? I think there are some newspaper item that didn’t show up in my playthrough, so there might be more “big” letterforms to find. Other than that… I don’t know! We’ll see!
Thanks!