*If you just want to know the contents of the shadow cat note and not the process, please proceed to the end*

The note next to the shadow cat on the cat tree is likely the first note you pick up in the game and it has general picture instructions, but also has writing with unknown symbols asking to be cracked.



The first assumption is that is a substitution cipher so we assign letters to each symbol to create a plain text version.

This is my conversion:

The next step was to attempt frequency analysis and to start trying to plug in common words to find a solution. When these methods failed solvers were used, but just returned nonsense. Clearly there was something being missed.



I looked around the hub trying to find some sort of hint that might lead me in the right direction and had a EUREKA moment. Scattered around the hub are some books with readable text, but they aren't in English.


I have a small understanding of Spanish and while I can parse some of the text and make assumptions on what it means, it clearly isn't in Spanish. One small translation later and find out it is Esperanto. If one book is using it, why wouldn't others?



Not knowing Esperanto drove me to an LLM. Providing my converted text and the suspected language I was able to get the following: (spoilers ahead)

"Ekcelaj dorlotegaj bestoj, sed ĉi tiu ĉi ne estas trejnita. La ideo estas ke ĝi lernu ekbruligi ĉiujn torĉojn, sed ĉi tiu malbona knabo faras la tute kontraŭan... Normale ili ne estas malfacilaj por trejni, sed ĉi tiu estas speciala kazo, estas en viaj manoj instrui ĝin, se vi povas."

Which roughly translates to:

"Excellent pets, but this one is not trained. The idea is for it to learn to light all the torches, but this bad boy does the complete opposite... Normally they are not difficult to train, but this is a special case, it is in your hands to teach it, if you can."

To no surprise, the note explains why the shadow cat does what it does while out on a job.