A new Borderlands 4 trailer was revealed during The Game Awards and the cryptic blink-and-you’ll-miss-them messages have already been deciphered.
YouTuber Skarrow9 took barely a day to uncover some of the hidden, still confusing words locked away in the secret phrases that splash across the screen for mere tenths of a second at a time during the new gameplay trailer.
“I did some monoalphabetic substitution stuff on the ciphers in the new Game Awards trailer for Borderlands 4 and solved some ciphers,” he says, as if that explains anything. Essentially, what he did was assign each distinct character in the ciphers with a corresponding letter and then plugged that phrase into a “monoalphabetic substitution cipher solver.”
This is just a program that assigns each character a new letter until it spits out a phrase that makes some semblance of sense. The answers Skarrow9 got are still a little cryptic, but at least they’re in English now.
The first of the four phrases he translated is the longest: “Invader cut me open, I died, and that’s just the start. Now my knife is redly suddenning. She saw right through me and into you. His hand on your neck. Rip it out from the roots.”
The rest are short and sweet: “You’re gonna like what comes with it,” “Time kept is brain lost,” and “It’s your turn.”
What do these messages mean? I have no idea. Fortunately, a lot of people in the comments do. “The line, ‘Invader cut me open and I died,’ I think this references Lilith warping Elpis through Kairos’s sky,” writes asuronkun95. “‘She saw right through me into you’ might reference the Seventh Siren. Do you think ‘His hand on your neck, Rip it out from the roots’ is talking about when Troy was draining Lil’s powers? That one might be a stretch, BUT we know that Sirens having their powers drained is extremely painful for them, so maybe this is the Timekeeper playing off her Trauma. I could just be grasping at straws a bit but still.”
What do you think? Comment your theories below.
In the meantime, check out everything we know about Borderlands 4 so far.