Noita Eye Glyphs

A puzzle found hidden between the background layers of the computer game Noita. The puzzle has not been solved since it was added to the game in October of 2020.

It is made of thousands of eye images, each eye looking in one of five directions, presented in nine rectangular blocks scattered throughout the game world. The game's developers have confirmed that the "eye decorations" do contain a message, and we have every indication that they are some kind of cipher puzzle.

It looks like nine ciphertexts, composed of a total of 3,108 eyeballs.

Players of Noita have documented many attempts to understand the eye glyphs, and most if not all of the community's efforts are listed in a document titled The Emerald Tablet.

Some notable documents from that list:

Noita Eye Glyph Messages recounts the discovery of the glyphs and the initial "trigram" interpretation, which has so far proven correct.

Noita Eye Data contains the eye glyphs in numerical form at every stage between raw eyeballs and trigrams.

Extensive cryptographic analysis (a large part of it done and/or reproduced by the current author) has failed to identify the cipher method used as any of the hundreds of specific, known ciphers that have been used either in puzzles or in cryptographic history. On the other hand, the analysis found a number of unusual qualities that have cryptographic significance.

My own document, Analytical Overview includes a summary of previous work followed by the results of various statistical methods and other observations on the glyphs, and also doubles as a book report on William F. Friedman's old codebreaking manuals.

The most significant oddity found in the eye glyphs are a set of patterns called isomorphs, a word with a very specific technical meaning in the context of classical ciphers that none of the solvers even knew about until it was found in Friedman's work. My other document, Isomorphism in Classical Ciphers, tries to explain the causes and significance of isomorphism to the casual reader.

Other items of note are the relative lack of repetitions other than the shared message openings, the low Index of Coincidence overall and within each message, and the low Kappa IoC when comparing each message to every other message (which suggests the messages do not share a key).

As far as we can tell, the "decorations" (as the developers call them) have absolutely no effect on gameplay.

Good luck!

* This article was originally published here