Story #15: A Detailed Look At Anodyne's Last Secret

 

Anodyne is a 2013 action-adventure game developed by Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka. The game is heavily inspired by classic Zelda titles and is absolutely full of obscure secrets. This video will be about one of them. Anodyne is still an incredibly obscure game, and this secret is even more so, and thus I hope to shed light on it and allow more people to speculate upon it. Let’s begin.

First, I’ll touch on Anodyne’s history, which is quite brief. Anodyne began production in 2012 by Melos Han-Tani, though he was soon joined by Marina Kittaka, a mutual friend of his. Together, they worked on the game until its eventual release in 2013. And that’s pretty much Anodyne’s production history. The game got a decent amount of attention when it was released, but soon after, pretty much everyone forgot about it. But in the same year it was released, the first bit of discussion about its obscure secret emerged.

Anodyne has an ungodly amount of secrets, from postgame cards (the game’s collectable of choice), to items that serve no purpose, to random NPCs, there’s tons of oddities you can find, most of them accessible via the swap tool, which I’ll briefty touch on.

The swap is an item you can access near the end of the game that allows you to swap any two tiles with each other, basically allowing you to completely break apart the game, which allows you to find many secrets. Most of them are simple collectibles, but a few of them are odd leftovers from the development of the game, as well as strange NPCs, which are both far more interesting to me than the simple collectibles. For example, if you use the swap on one of the bottommost rooms of the Lake, you can find a strange room containing nothing but grass and few red pellets on the ground, seeming to serve no purpose. These are what most swap-required secrets in the game are like, and what the obscure secret presumably. Okay, I’ll stop beating around the struggling-economy bush, let’s discuss the secret itself.

In an post on r/IAmA released the same year as the game, Melos and Marina answered questions from various fans, but I’m only interested in two of them right now. A user named Minderaser asked 11 questions in 1 comment, but I’ll focus on this one:

Has all of the game content been discovered?

Melos responded to all of these, and his response to the one we’re focusing on right now is intriguing:

Yes. Well, except this one thing…

He gave no further info in his initial reply. However, in the same thread, user avarisclari replied:

My only question: are there any secrets noone has found yet?

Melos responded to it as such:

Just one, I think…but it’s reallllly obscure and there are no hints to it anywhere.

User kiwasabi responded with this:

Any chance of a cryptic clue?

He didn’t respond, but a deleted user had presumably asked another question, to which Melos elegantly responded:

Nope!

If anyone has any information on what this removed comment was, please let me know. That’s all of the discussion around the secret in that thread, but it sparked multiple others that I shall now discuss.

On a post entitled “Remaining secrets…” posted on r/anodyne, user ergman said this:

So I just finished 100%-ing this game (as far as I know), And I can’t help but wonder if there are any secrets left to find. There’s lots of easter eggs that aren’t cards and ???s, like the weird green blob and the weird red blob and the Mystery Moose The main thing I’m curious of is the statement that the game can be beaten in 20 minutes. howsat?

The weird green blob they’re referring to is a strange ear-like thing found in the Apartment, and the red blob is an amorphous mass smoking a blunt found in the Red Cave. The Mystery Moose is an enigmatic creature that occasionally appears in the Green Forest. And just for precision, the 20-minute rumor is possible because of a glitch entitled the “wiggle glitch,” which you can read up on elsewhere. The post itself contains no valuable information, but in one of the comments, which is now deleted, user unvaluablespace replied:

Found a guide recently on steam community for an NPC quest. (they link to the guide) Didnt even realize I missed it, as I’ve gotten everything else. After talking to the npcs and getting into the stairway, the stone says something about a hidden temple entrance north of trees in blue forest, and that you need the swap tool to get to it. Well I’ve looked everywhere, I cannot find this “hidden temple entrance”. My only guess is it refers to something I already got, but why “temple entrance” if its just another item? Also, the moose in the forest appears (randomly) in 4 different locations. Still don’t understand the meaning behind the moose or what its even there for. I did however, take note that there are two lighter colored plants in only two locations in the forest. Both which where the moose appears, but what I find interesting is only one of the two can be moved with the swap tool. Finally, I was messing around in my save file awhile back and came across mentions of a “bacon_town” in the save. The last secret he said was real obscure and with no hints, so I don’t know whether to take “obscure” in the sense of a freakin bacon town, or “obscure” as in its not even a big deal, in which case I’m pretty sure an entire town made of bacon would be a worthy secret. Lol.

Most of it is inessential, though just so you know, the “temple entrance” mentioned is a hidden area in the Blue Forest that leads to the Archives, a relatively well-known area. The part I find interesting, however, are the last few sentences. Almost no one else has discussed this topic, and it’s honestly fascinating to me, as it’s just so strange. It will be mentioned again later, so get hyped. A deleted user responded to unvaluablespace, and they responded with this:

You get to the archives through the hidden windmill. I think the temple your referring to is the one that leads from the white (Blank) map, to the hidden section of the nexus. There’s no way to get to the archives through the blue forest, unless that’s the part I’m missing lol. Bacon town was listed twice in the save file, near the bottom. Its referred to by two different names, bacon town, and bacon world. The moose is mentioned in the save as well, as “huge_fucking_stag” lol.

What’s interesting to me is that there’s also apparently a “bacon world,” which is just so weird to me that it’s mentioned twice. I doubt there’s actually a bacon world in the game, but it would be neat. That’s all there is in this thread, but the saga of the last secret is still not over.

The next thread we’ll discuss was posted in 2013, shortly after the ama Melos and Marina did, titled “one more obscure secret” and posted on the Anodyne board on GameFAQS by user valcfield. The post reads as follows:

per the reddit ama with Melos and Marina… so… get cracking people? for those not through with post game- this would not be any of 49 cards, or any of the ??? section (i say that because the pictures for that section were pulled, and melos basically confirmed via tweet that those pictures were accurate, as in, there is nothing left in that section). that said, i don’t quite know what would count as an extra secret if its not collectible? also, from ama, ‘no hints anywhere.’ there have been a couple rooms mentioned (4 torches, dead ends) where we don’t know any purpose. could possibly be related to those? also, from ama, and to nip it in the bud, nothing to do with 50 gate- melos openly talked about possibility of a future patch allowing you to get past it, but for now, nada. its hard to imagine we’ve all collectively missed a screen somewhere… so my top two guesses are 1. some action in one of those aforementioned ‘purposeless’ rooms activites something oooor 2. somewhere in the glitched out world, there is something. that would qualify as obscure, especially without hints on where to look… edit: melos has confirmed this is *not* the case. 3. there could be some of the harder to glitch through areas that aren’t fully explored. in particular, thinking about the area that has the 47 gate, 50 gate, starting zone of the game…. w/o a map, hard for me to picture if iv’e seen every viable square.

The user Darkcloud20 responded as follows:

Something that no body mentioned here so far. If you don’t get the jump shoes until you reach the mountain. Mitra will then appear there and give them to you. The salesman will restore your health instead of giving you something for the box BUT what if you trade the box for the bike shoes and don’t give them to Mitra. Will she: a) not appear on the mountain to give you the jump shoes b) appear on the mountain, give them to you and take the biking shoes c) appear on the mountain, give them to you and you keep the biking shoes. c) seems the most likely so this would be a way to keep both shoes.

User kiwasabi (who appeared early) replied:

My hunch is somewhere in the debug world. At the very least I think that it’s something dev-related. I realized about the ??? cards is that they’re most likely assets that the developers ended up not using for enemies and characters, so they repurposed them as collectibles. Regarding what DarkCloud20 said, I actually encountered this situation in my second playthrough. I never managed to get the box to trade the salesman, and now the orange dude that hates the cats has it cornered and refuses to give it to me. I thought I had to wait until I got the swap to go steal it, but I go back there and can’t take it. I can’t even remember how I got it in the first playthrough so this is a bit odd. Interestingly enough, since he’s guarding the box, he isn’t guarding the hidden card in the level. I was able to just go grab it without ‘cleaning his house’ first. I’m pretty puzzled by all the numbers (1,1 , the big 64, etc). He said there weren’t any hints to the last secret so I guess these are unrelated. There’s also the bizarre area to the left of the Nexus that you can swap to, but if you swap in any direction that gets you nowhere. And I guess you guys were able to get to the floating 4 or 5 stones on the outside of the right pre-Briar area wall with the wiggle trick? Never got to them myself, but never tried that glitch. I have no ideas about the room in the clown temple with the 4 torches, just seemed like a red herring to me.

valcfield responded to kiwasabi with this:

a bit confused on some of these- if the “1,1” you’re referring to is in the area with a bunch of numbers, those were the hints for the red cube (can’t remember another 1,1, but been awhile since i explored). what’s the big 64? as for the floating stones- those stones were the ones that had the clues for the original tile puzzle in v 1.503, and melos has confirmed as much. i’ve wondered about the square that has the red leaves in a field in it… (note: this is the room in the Lake I mentioned earlier) the field is groomed so specifically, and then has the red leaves, i was wondering if someone knew if this was an allusion to another game and if so which? i could see the screen lining up with some other game that you rearrange say, the leaves, to recreate… but that’s only because i don’t know if/what this is referencing.

Darkcloud20 responded to valcfield about the leaves:

It reminded me of Tetris and I moved the leaves down so they would form a line in the groomed field but nothing.

User Advenith posted this on the thread:

I did notice something a little odd in my game. (they link to a picture of the card menu displaying 50 cards possessed) I somehow have fifty cards. I’ve collected all of the post-game items aside from the cube in the forest. Despite this, the 50 gate won’t open. So on that note, it’s definitely not the gate.

valcfield responded to Advenith as follows:

don’t know if there are multiple triggers, but you can get a 50th card to show up anytime by glitching back to the ‘island’ that had the 49th card. this is a bug, and after you save, though it will show up in the title screen, you will revert to only having 49 cards once the game actually loads.

A user named ZERO-UNIT wrote this:

In the “prison” in debug world there are computer monitors strewn about that can be switched on. Many of them seem impossible to get to but I’ve managed to turn about 10 of them on (between the two rooms). I am referring to the rooms in which Melos and Marina. Maybe something to toy around with…

For reference, I turned on every computer, and nothing happened, so I guess that doesn’t cause anything. User Leg_Horse (great taste by the way) wrote this:

There’s a mysterious button in the void surrounding the nexus. It’s two screens left, two screens up from the warp to the beach. It’s in an area where you can walk around freely, but you’ll need to swap a walkable tile onto the button in order to press it. I don’t know if this has been brought up anywhere before, are there any other buttons like this in the game? Also, has anybody managed to explore the screens to the north of the briar?

valcfield replied to this:

don’t know about screens north of briar, but yes, button has been mentioned, and melos (dev) said that it was just a leftover that was not taken out.

Leg_Horse then wrote this:

Ok, one other minor thing that I don’t *think* was mentioned in the previous thread: I noticed while making a screenshot map of the Unclaimed Territory that there are two screens below the 47 card warp that are just completely inaccessible by either swapping or wiggling. There’s an invisible barrier at the bottom of the screen that straight-up can’t be wiggled past. As far as I know, that’s the only obstacle of that kind in the game. The two screens in question have screens to the left and right of them which can be wiggled through, ultimately leading to the glitch area. They also leave a distinctive gap in an otherwise rectangular map. Could be something, could easily be nothing.

valcfield replied to this:

hehe yeah those two screens are where the 50 gate are (figured that out via going through the glitch-zone versions), or well, the one directly below 47 is basically a blank screen followed below by the 50 gate (i’m basing this off of traversing the glitch zone counterpart, which does not have the impassable walls)

User salmon_samurai wrote a brief paragraph about the moose in the forest which we touched on earlier, and that was the end of the thread. Don’t worry, that was the last long one. Not much was revealed about the secret (in fact nothing at all), but quite a few other interesting secrets were mentioned and/or discovered in this thread.

In 2013, a user named outofcontext 0 posted a thread titled “16 slots? And a message for the devs.” The post read as follows:

I noticed that on the ??? screen there are 16 empty slots you can put the cursor on. Are there actually 16 secrets with 3 undiscovered?

The rest of it was a nice paragraph thanking the devs for making the game, but it’s not useful for our topic at hand. User WhoAreYouWhoAmI bluntly replied:

There are 13 ??? items.

outofcontext0 responded:

Yes I know but your cursor can go over 16 slots on the ??? menu. Why would that even be there if there wasn’t supposed to be more items?

WhoAreYouWhoAmI wrote back:

No idea. Maybe they planned on inserting more ???s and never got around to it? But the creators have said that there is only one undiscovered secret left, so at most there could only be 14 ???s.

This is an interesting theory to me, but I doubt that the obscure secret is another collectible. But then again, it’s not like we have literally any info about it, so it definitely could be.

Still in 2013, Darkcloud20 posted a thread on Gamefaqs entitled “Hast the last kind of ellusive secret been found?” It reads as follows:

Melos mentioned something like that after everything had been found by the people here on the board that there is some kind of last ellusive secret. Has it been found yet?

AdeonWriter responded:

Card 50 is presumed unobtainable. Though it may be hidden very, very well.

ShinDNA replied:

No one said anything about card 50. That’s old news now. Apparently, after everything, there is still one last unreported secret. I keep checking this board in hopes that someone has found it. It’s not card 50, it’s not the blue “ear” looking guy, the red blob, the giant elk, the extra swap broom. It’s none of those to the best of my knowledge. Although to be honest I think Melos is trolling us.

To be completely honest, I have no idea what the “extra swap broom” is. But anyways, valcfield replied:

likewise stalk the board for the same. do you guys follow on steam? i never bothered getting a steam code. wasn’t sure if that board might have yielded results…

Unfortunately, no one has discussed the secret on the Steam board. Quite a few years later in 2020, ManWithNoBrows posted this on GameFAQs under the title “Did anyone ever discover ever secret in Anodyne?”

In 2014, someone posted a thread entitled, ‘“one more obscure secret” not yet found (spoliers [sic], natch)’ insisting that not all secrets had been discovered. (a thread we talked about earlier) Has anyone ever discovered the last of the secrets, and if so, is there a guide documenting them? Which one(s) hadn’t been discovered at that point?

Unfortunately, no one responded. The most recent time someone has mentioned the topic was in 2022, posted in r/Anodyne by Papa-Bear453767 (a reference to funny Spaghet meme), under the title “Last secret in Anodyne.” And yes, this is me. I posted the following:

No one’s discussed this for a while, but has anyone found the supposed “obscure last secret” the devs described in an ama?

No one responded. And that was the end, for right now at least, of one of the least interesting topics someone could make an article on. But I would still like to speculate on what the secret may be.

Personally, I believe there’s no way the Bacon Town and Bacon World were anything other than weird leftovers or placeholders. I doubt the “obscure secret” is another dungeon or something, as those imply. I also doubt it’d just be another item, as I feel someone would’ve found that by now. I believe the most likely thing it would be is an incredibly obscure and difficult to find NPC. But then again, with how almost everything in the game is mapped out,. it wouldn’t surprise me if Melos was just trolling us. And at this point, that seems the most likely.

I hope everyone enjoyed this article. Goodbye.

Sources:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18ugd9/we_are_sean_hogan_and_jon_kittaka_and_made_the/, questions asked by minderaser and avarisclari
https://www.reddit.com/r/anodyne/comments/1l8mus/remaining_secrets/
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/703139-anodyne/65498963
https://www.reddit.com/r/anodyne/comments/1lo66d/16_slots_and_a_message_for_the_devs/
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/703139-anodyne/66563255
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/703139-anodyne/77394589
https://www.reddit.com/r/anodyne/comments/vg084y/last_secret_in_anodyne/