Hello World! I'm new here but I thought I'd try and get involved with this since I've played around with speedrunning Vexx a little. How's tricks? I was watching Strategism's live stream with the developer and the dev mentions at one point that the weird symbols they made up all have letters corresponding to them. Compelled, I thought I'd give deciphering the symbols a whirl. First I needed to find as many instances of the symbols as possible, since the more examples we had the easier it'd be to see what letters appear often, and try and make some guesses. I remembered something I'd noticed a long time ago - if you look closely at the Vexx logo, you can see four of the symbols on the first x. The first three are different, then the forth is the third one repeated. I then thought it'd be safe to assume these four symbols meant 'vexx', which was a good start. Next I looked through the instruction manual. In the background of some of the pages the same string of symbols is repeated. It's most clearly written out on the controls page (page 8 in the gamecube manual). I then turned the game on. My goal was to find writing on walls with the symbols, so I'd have more information to work with. With this in mind, I headed over towards the resting place, where you start the game. I noticed as I walked through the door to Timberdale, that a collection of the symbols appear in the top right, then change into letters for the name of the place. I then thought this was going to be dead easy... I took a picture of the screen on entering all the levels and compared the symbols to the letters, and assumed that each symbol meant the same as the character it transformed into. This made a full alphabet, except for J, Q, Y and Z, since none of these letters appear in level names. I thought I'd be finished here, but then things get a little weird. Going back to the four symbols on the Vexx logo, they don't match up with this alphabet. In the alphabet made from the level names, the first symbol is still V, then the second one wasn't one I found so was either J, Q, Y or Z (or something I've not accounted for) and the last letter was M. Furthermore, trying to decrypt the symbols in the instruction manual with this alphabet makes FOURT?TWO, with ? being a symbol I've not found elsewhere. So I'm not sure what to make of this. My first thought was that somehow the symbols to letters in the level names didn't match up to the symbols to letters used in the logo and instruction manual - maybe there was two sets of encryptions that were being passed around the office during development. Or maybe there's something I'm missing, maybe some of these symbols are punctuation or an anagram or something ridiculous. What I do know is that I need more examples of places in the game that contain these symbols, to see if I can decrypt them, or if I can use them to make a different alphabet. I'll be looking and if anyone else can think of places with these symbols I'd appreciate it if you let me know where they are! All the instances I've found (so far) are:

• The four characters on the Vexx logo.
• The 9 symbols that occur several times in the instruction manual.
• The floating symbols during the press start screen.
• The symbols appearing in the top right of the screen when you enter a level, or load up the warp hub.
• The symbols appearing very briefly before fading into letters when you initially view a heart riddle.
• In the Citadel of Shadows, in the section where you go back and down, then take the elevator downwards there is a collection of large symbols floating about the clock arrows. Hope this interests you and that you'll get involved!

I think your decryption of the letters in the instruction manual are an indication that you've got it right. I'm betting that the ? symbol is a Y -- this would make that string of characters spell FOURTYTWO, which is of course the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I'll keep an eye out for any other strings of characters that we might be able to decrypt to reveal other easter eggs.