Hello! This is my first Steam guide. I want to share some of the cool secrets in The Hex, since there are basically no pics or videos out there with these things. Enjoy! <3
This is not a guide on how to get those secrets. Go here for that. Also, I tried to put everything in order of appearance/relevance.
UNMARKED SPOILERS AHEAD!
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Update Log:

• 11-27-21, 12:05am: Added the Freeing Vallamir Dialogue, Kraken Date, and more misc. items in the appropriate section.
  
• 11-27-21, 2:05pm: Added the Fantasy Island section.
  
• 11-27-21, 10:25pm: Added Soda Machine Recordings & Jeremiah; Hologram Catarina's Words; Rune Sightings & Translations; more things to the misc. section.
  
• 11-28-21: Added Carla's Computers in SoL; bandito7's Contributions; Asmodeus's Appearance; The Smithy's Secret Project; an extra rune translation; an extra Fantasy Island detail; and more misc. items.
  
• 11-29-21: added Beneath The Surface Items, will upload more pics there when Steam's uploading system decides to work.
  
• 11-30-21: put in the rest of the Beneath The Surface items I have.
  
• 2-18-22: just popped in to add a little note about Lionel's signature in the SWK3 screenshots. While I'm here though, I just wanna say thanks for the lovely responses to this guide! <3 The Hex's creator himself, Daniel Mullens, ALSO noticed it and thanked me for making it on Twitter, which is absolutely BONKERS! The support and comments from the community have been lovely and I'm glad I could share some cool stuff about such an amazing game. THANK YOU ALL! C:
  
• 10-2-23: Returned to Beneath The Surface thanks to Steam user sachdaniil's comment about the Strange Disk. I also show The Hex's true ending hidden in Beneath The Surface.
  
• 10-5-23: Added Catarina's message in the SWK Waste World mod, more of Carla's words & other messages in SoL, an additional appearance from bandito7, a new section (The Chewing Gum Mystery), edits to The Smithy's Secret Project, and some more stuff to the Miscellaneous section.
  
• 10-9-23: Put in my thoughts of Catarina's final SWK message (in the Waste World mod); added more details & theories about Jeremiah, more cool stuff in the Misc. part, and a new section (The Secret Locket & The True Ending).
  
• 10-11-23: Added "The Inn" to Tarot Cards in Walk, a screenshot to "bandito7's Contributions", some more info to Miscellaneous Details & Easter Eggs, the rest of the Lazarus screenshots to The Secret Locket & The True Ending, and a new section (Carla's Symbol & Lore).
  
• 10-13-23: Added a new section (Welcome To Entervale).
  
• 10-13-23: Put in some more screenshots and tweaked the new section a tad.
  
• 10-18-23: Finished the section "The Secret Locket & The True Ending".

Here are all the things Catarina tells you in the Super Weasel Kid games!
SWK 1 (after you get 50 coins):
SWK 2 (after you get 50 coins again):
SWK 3 (if you've gotten the first 2 secrets, she'll tell you the 3rd without you having to do anything). The weird black squigly lines flickering in the top-left corner is Lionel's signature (kinda sad that it's attached to this game specifically as it was made to cash in on his brand...):
SWK Waste World Mod:
Getting to Catarina is a bit more of a process, and I figured I'd explain it instead of trying to fit it all in parenthesis above. You do not have to get all of the coins, nor do you have to have gotten the other secrets from her, at least in the playthrough I did.
Here's how I got to Catarina:
In the mod, there is a coin that appears to be solid. Shooting it doesn't result in it being collected; it just stays there.
(The con I'm referring to is on the left side of the screenshot, with the cursor hovering over it.)
Seemingly just a bug. BUT . . . if you jump and shoot the coin while you are in the air, it results in you going up a little more. The more you shoot the coin, the higher you go, and it gives you some air time. So, you have to stand on the platform pictured above, jump and shoot the coin as fast as possible. Keep shooting until you get enough height in the air to reach the platform above. Catarina is across from that platform.
When you talk to Catarina, this is what she says:
I'm so fascinated by this. Is "the serum" the thing that was injected into Rust's head? By "he", I assume Catarina means Irving, so why did Irving use the serum on Rust? So many interesting questions!
The only reason I discovered this secret was because of user @Thechugg7 commenting and asking whether anyone managed to talk to Catarina in the SWK mod; I hadn't even realized Catarina was in the mod. Because of that, I went looking for her, and found her in the end! So thanks for the comment!

Here are Carla's hidden words/items in Secrets Of Legendaria!
This computer duplicates any one item in your inventory to fill every slot.
And by walking left or down on this screen, you can glitch out-of-bounds to see this message:
Carla's words before the dragon boss (one of the only Carla messages you usually won't miss during the game).
This computer gives you a fish that increases your critical hit chance.
You can see this one on your way to the fishing island.
On the left of the glitched ankh location:
I went looking for more Carla messages thanks to user @kitty's comment; that's why I have this many so far!
There are also other messages/secret items you can find when you unlock the fishing rod. Fishing off of the island, you can catch this:
This locket is the biggest key item to guiding you to where the True Ending of the game is. I discuss that more in the section, "The Secret Locket & The True Ending".
You can also find a message that tells you how to get to Fantasy Island:
When you fish off of the dock in the desert area, you can find this item:
This item tells you how to get the Missingno boss in SoL (by going to the lava lake in the dragon's cave and going left & up/down against the shore). I'm not sure why "Cinnabar" specifically is a part of this message. Also, as far as I can tell, using the bottle to restore HP doesn't unlock/do anything special; it just heals the party/character.

When you put "Entervale" as Chandrelle's name in Secrets Of Legendaria, everything suddenly changes. The moment you enter the last "e" in that code, the SoL map vanishes, and is replaced by a strange purple world.
The words "his father pure evil" are said over & over by a currently-unseen figure. The few trees around are transparent, and most of the map is also gone.
Meanwhile, the tutorial dialogue is still playing, and Moji eventually goes down to the spot where you would meet him in the actual game. Once he's gone, you can explore this strange place (which the fans have dubbed Entervale for . . . obvious reasons lol) as you please. But know that once you fight an enemy though (either Moji, or a slime on the top area of the map), you'll start SoL back from the beginning, with Moji waking Chandrelle up.
I took as many screenshots of interesting sights as possible. Here are a few of the things I found:
"pitiful soul weak"
"B BOY was here" (still trying to figure out who that is, lmk if you know!)
A large picture of a television standby screen repeatedly spinning (it's far too big to take a full picture of, but here's some of it).
"crying 0's and im hearing 111's"
"1110011", and creepy Vallimar eye on the top-left.
It turns out that (a version of?) Vallamir is the one saying "his father pure evil" over & over. I don't 100% know why, but his face looks kind of off in Entervale.
The sentence/string of words in the next pictures are too hard for me to read. If anyone knows what is said, please comment!
Also, the helmet floating in this area is of a crusader fighter that appeared in Bryce's chapter, during Bryce's montage of climbing up the ranks (when the article "Chef Bryce: The New Meta??!" is in the background). That has to be a connection to Pony Island, which also had a crusader involved in the plot.
Not too far away, the head of another Combat Arena X character, Bhakto (the first person Bryce fights after the training scene), is floating. The mark on his forehead that glowed when he summoned his grandfather is now blood red, and his face is pretty scratched up, too.
Seeing this and revisiting Bhakto made me realize that Secrets Of Legendaria wasn't Vallimar's first game--Combat Arena X was. The words when the grandfather talks are purple, and it makes sense for a spirit-ish character like Vallimar to have such an origin.
Nearby, there are two sets of eyes.
The bottom set of eyes looks to be from either the fighter with the mariachi hat (the 4th one Bryce faces in the montage) or Maniacus (the fighter with the monocle in the montage, who returns in Walk to be Steambot Willie's first opponent). It's very hard to tell which one of them it is, because they have very similar eyes. The one thing I can say for sure is that it's 100% not Sado's eyes--though they are similar, Sado's eyes has more than 3 eyelashes on each one.
I thought the top one was from another fighter in Combat Arena X, BUT as I was getting more in-game screenshots for the guide, I realized that those HAVE to be Rust's eyes! They're an exact match, including the lines underneath!
Rust's eyes appear multiple times in Entervale. One of its locations has 2 red dots not far from it.
That's all of the interesting sights that I found. Now, here's where some interesting fun can happen.
One of the only interactable things in Entervale is the computer Carla's hidden computer SoL, the one that duplicates an item in your inventory.
Now, what item do you have at the beginning of the game, before the tutorial has ended? That's right--the spellbook Vallimar gave Chandrelle. Using Carla's computer, we can duplicate it, and you can see the results here:
There are some shenanigans that can happen because of this.
You can use your original trio of spells on the slimes to see how the design was intended--OOF, is it much harder than with Vallimar's spells. The low damage is already bad (7-9 hit points) but each spell is also basically the same "hit one enemy" move with a HUGE mana cost. Lionel, buddy, what were you thinking?
Then, if you use the book during the slime fight and do the tutorial as-intended after that, it'll result in you having your Vallimar spells before you were intended to.
Moji won't realize it though, and will go through his normal dialogue as if you're hitting him with light spells instead of THE FORCE OF THE DARK LORD'S MAGIC. Naturally, he dies before he finishes his spiel.
Also when he dies, instead of the Twitch chat calling you a murderer, this happens?
I also had chat get bored on me early on, which I've never seen before. I assume this is because I tried to skip past Moji altogether and finish SoL without killing him, but accidently found out that once you go in a building, you go back to the start of the game when you leave it.
(I actually did do a run of SoL without killing Moji to see what would happen, but despite what I heard, nothing changed? I was kind of bummed, ngl.)
More interesting things can occur once Lazarus joins the party, because if you still have at least 1 copy of Vallimar's tome, then you can have him read it, too.
Once he does, he gets the same set of spells Chandrelle got, and loses all ability to fight (also, the screen of what happens when Vallimar's book is read moved towards the bottom-left corner for some reason).
The problem with this is that Lazarus has 0/0 mana, which means he can't gain any mana at all, and thus cannot cast the new spells he's equipped with. It's kind of funny, I'll admit.

If you find and defeat the secret doppelganger miniboss, you get this item.
If you use the Mimic Charm during the Missingno fight, this happens.
And if you use the glitched-out attack that appears in Chandrelle's moves, you get this.
After this, the game crashes, and if you're playing on Steam, you get the ERROR 57 achievement. Good for you!
If you've played Pony Island though, the final screenshot should contain a familiar face: the demon Asmodeus[pony--island.fandom.com], one of the final bosses of the game!
I wonder why he made an appearance. . . If you have any ideas, comment below!

After you buy out the shop in SoL twice, when it restocks, one of the items will be a key. You can purchase it for 250 gold,
Then, go the corresponding house (the one on Moji Junior's screen, as you can see below),
Using the key, you can open the door, and see . . . this.
You cannot interact with any of the items or with what appears to be a dead body in any way.
So, what exactly is this? Well, it appears at the Smithy was attempting to create The Hex itself. They attempted it many, many times, but couldn't succeed. If I had to guess, the Smithy was likely killed by Irving for this traitorous behavior.
On the other hand, it's also possible that the Smithy DID succeed in creating The Hex, but was killed by Irving for this, and The Hex was taken by Gameworks as a result.
Definitely a lot to speculate on here. . .

Here is what Mr. Squarrel tells you about what happened to Mr. Shrewd. :,C

Here's some dialogue from the hidden Kraken date!

Dialogue between Vallamir and Rust:
Dialogue with Vallamir's servant in Waste World:
Dialogue before ??? sets Vallamir free:
Dialogue after ??? sets Vallamir free:
From here, the screen turns purple, and the game cuts to credits.

Here are Catarina's tarot readings in Walk!
Here's the very last card, and what it says behind it. I guess Lionel will never finish that book. . .
And here's Catarina's reading of it (you can get this upon a replay/scene select after finishing the game, because significant items carry through upon repeated playthroughs):

bandito7 is a reoccurring person in the story. From what I can tell, they first appear during Bryce's section, in the montage of Bryce climbing up the ranks as a fighter (note the author of the "Bryce Players, Our Time Has Come!" forum post):
In Secrets Of Legendaria, bandito7 plays a much more significant role, sending messages in the game livestream chat to give you answers to puzzles/riddles.
As I was reading up on The Hex's secrets, I saw this comment from Aumires that read, "Vicious Galaxy 2 was made with bandito7 stolen assets." Intrigued, I looked into it, and found out that the Waste World aliens mod was indeed made by bandito7. . .
. . . and sure enough, these aliens are the main enemy in Vicious Galaxy 2.
If you don't see the chapter title from Waste World, it's an easy thing to miss.
So did Lionel steal bandito7's work outright? Or was bandito7 paid for Lionel's company to get their game assets? OR perhaps Lionel was able to cheat the legal system to acquire the aliens, since the aliens were made for Waste World?
It's an interesting mystery to be sure. . .
Oh, and by the way, here's what Lionel calls bandito7's Cryptons/mod in Walk ( for the first screenshot, look at the enemy description on the top-left; for the second screenshot, read the comments written in the black & white window). Interesting how Lionel would turn around and use those "nonsense" enemies for his own games!

Here are screenshots of the hidden Fantasy Island VN! For a guide on how to get this, go here.
If you thought it ends suddenly, well, yeah, it does. The game stops here and closes.
Also, Trish's last line is a reference to this moment in Secrets Of Legendaria.
DID she ever find that fruit platter? The world will never know. . .

Here are all the soda machine recordings, starting from the basement.
Now the ground floor!
If you power up the portal, you can go inside (the background is the mountains from Super Weasel Kid 2: Radical Road), and this is what happens:
??? falls to their knees, and you are taken back to the portal entrance, unable to power it up again.
Finally, the upper floor.

Jeremiah has been around since Lionel's first game, as we can see in the Rootbeer Reggie scene near the end.
He's the leader of the break-in for The Hex in Lazarus's path.
And when his face is revealed in the final scene, we can see (1) that he is the hooded figure that has been communicating to the characters & us throughout the game, and (2) there is evidence that he possibly originated Groonda, due to the mushroom sprouting from his head.
I saw some people in the discussion suggesting he's an error in the same realm as Sado, but I haven't found evidence of that in-game. The soda machine recordings are JUST vague enough to leave quite a bit to interpretation, but we can conclude a few things from the facts given.
1. Jeremiah is a "pawn" of Reggie, and because of this, likely does things under Reggie's orders. From talking to the player characters to breaking into Gameworks, Reggie might be the one who got Jeremiah to act and do all of those things.
2. Make no mistake though. From the sound of it ("Now Jeremiah was having some fun.") Jeremiah was happy to do things for Reggie.
3. Jeremiah is probably one of Lionel's first created characters. Though I'm very curious what, "Lionel taught [Jeremiah] to behave," means, because that has some very threatening undertones. . .
The remains you can find when doing the Lararus' Hotline Miami style level with Junior: a skeleton with one of those alien-head-things that went into Rust's brain in the Waste World level. There is grass or some kind of greenery growing on the bones. Upon seeing it, Lazarus says this:
I'm still confused by this moment tbh. . . What did Jeremiah do exactly? Given Catarina's comment about "the serum" in the SWK Waste World mod, did Jeremiah possibly get his hands on "the serum", and use it to finish someone off?
And then we have this scene:
Keep in mind that the alien is actually Irving. This scene shows that Irving knows Jeremiah, and has considered that Jeremiah could get revenge for something. But Jeremiah was considered "above that" by Irving, for whatever reason.
1. What does the ground floor message, "Lionel shut off the power, while Gameworks was trying to save," mean? Going through the events of Walk, I couldn't really figure out what this meant. Be sure to comment if you might have an idea!
2. How long has Jeremiah been working for Reggie? From Rootbeer Tender and onward? Were any of Jeremiah's actions his own, or were they all guided by Reggie in some form or manner?
3. How does Jeremiah travel freely between games, and know about the occurrences of the outside world that affect the games (he has knowledge of the modders in Waste World, for example)? Then again, Chandrelle also knew about knowledge outside of her game (she knew that being OP would get her taken out of Combat Arena X), so maybe that knowledge is easy to come by if you know where to look?

I stumbled across this as I was getting the soda secrets, so here is what hologram Catarina has to say to Rust and ???. I tried to talk to her with Lazarus, but Lazarus has to go into the kitchen (he goes there even if you use the teleporter, and you can't use the elevator), so no could do. And the holograms don't appear with the other characters before Rust's chapter, so I assume you can't speak to her as Weasel Kid, Bryce, or Chandrelle.
Her words to Rust.
Her words to ???.
Her last words here are, "What a shame." Sorry, I couldn't click the screenshot button in time. ^^;
After she speaks, her hologram disappears.

So, when I came back to The Hex to add more secrets to this guide, it was on a different computer than the one I played on, and upon installing Steam, my save file was completely gone (not that I had played very much on Steam anyway--I first played The Hex via itch.io--but moving on). I had to start a new game from scratch.
When I got to Rust's level, I got a chance to buy this strange item:
I immediately bought it to see what role it could play in the rest of Rust's section, but it never came back. Curious, I did some research on the Chewing Gum, and found some comments on it in the community's Hunt for the Secret Ending thread.
So it seems that the Chewing Gum was added in a patch, and is simply an item that helped solve the cipher that unlocks the secret ending. Right? Well. . .
The thing that befuddles me is that in the community's findings, it can only be unlocked in the Wastelands by duplicating it via Carla's computer in Secrets Of Legendaria. However, I never found the Chewing Gum in SoL. So . . . what's up with that?
If you have an idea, let me know! I'm very puzzled by this mystery.

After playing Walk again, I noticed that Carla is symbolized by a rubber duck.
Here are a few other places where her duck shows up:
There's also a sound in the room on the right of the kitchen that has no title, but to me, sounds like a rubber duck being squeezed/squeaked (it's the one the cursor is hovering over):
And here is what Lionel says about Carla in Walk.
You can definitely feel Carla's disdain for Lionel via the hidden comments in SoL, and now, we know Lionel's point-of-view on their relationship.

So upon replaying this game, I noticed a few runes here and there.
(On the base of the gold statue.)
So I googled a rune alphabet [i.pinimg.com]to translate what exactly the game is saying! Here goes. . .
Gold Statue's Base: TO? MY GREATEST CREATION
Trish's statement: LOSER SA[character unknown] THWAT
Reggie's first speech bubble: A BEEPER PER[H]APS [H]IS FAT[H]ER PURE EVI[L]
Reggie's second speech bubble: [character unknown]O MAMA
Reggie's third speech bubble: SARSAPAXILLA
If there are any other runes in the game I should translate, please comment and let me know!

Here are the things that give you the path to the True Ending of The Hex. Now, finding that ending was a community effort that took dozens of people to do--and you can find a summary of that here. This is just a write-up of the key items and things in-game that lead to where the True Ending is.
The key item here is The Locket. You find the first half by fishing on the fishing island dock in SoL:
Note that the locket is passed off the Lazarus. When you're playing his section, and are going to the last orb in the R&D area, there's an place on the map with 3 wooden docks:
The upper dock has the path to where you need to go; the lower dock has a slime. The middle dock doesn't seem to have anything at first glance, but if you go to it (assumedly after unlocking the fishing minigame in SoL) you can fish!
If you have the first half of the locket, you fish up the second half:
After that, all you fish up is garbage.
Then, you have to find a secret room by walking through the wall as Larazrus's SoL self. In that secret room is a (supposedly) minor character named Wizarro.
When you talk to him, this is what he says:
After this, you have to put a file called "cipher.cipher" in The Hex's "SaveData" folder. Once you do that, and return to Wizzaro, he says the encrypted message. Here's just some of what he says (I didn't get all of it because it's super long, but I'll probably go back and screenshot the rest later, just for the sake of archiving it somewhere):
The fabulous community surrounding The Hex has already figured out the cipher for the message, which is "S@rsap@R177A|092X57333|@2734$666$$@d051". Open your "cipher.cipher" file in a .txt editor, then input that cipher. Once you do, you can return to Wizarro and hear the translated message, which is a conversation between Lionel & Carla.
So, Lionel had Carla hide some kind of file in a game of hers--specifically, a fishing game. That is where Beneath The Surface comes into play.
Beneath The Surface is the fishing game made by Carla. There are lot of items to fish up that will be discussed in the next section, but to access the secret ending, you have to find the Old Locket. You can get it by fishing at around 240m, if memory serves. When you find it, its description is garbled text.
Putting your "cipher.cipher" file in the save data of this game causes the message to then read, "type lionel.exe".
By typing "lionel.exe" while playing Beneath The Surface, you then get transported to a new, 3D space that is clearly an early version of Walk. Here are a few screenshots:
As you go through the space, Lionel talks about how he has the feeling that his game characters are alive, and that someone is after him. He also discusses how he misses Reggie, the character from his first game, Root Beer Tender, and reveals that Reggie was made in the image of his grandpa who eventually died. Reggie & his game was deleted after Super Weasel World was created, because Lionel wanted to seem like a prodigy who had made his first game an amazing success. He says that Irving took care of deleting the game & Reggie, because Lionel didn't have the heart to do it himself, and Irving said that Reggie would be back in other games, but that never happened. As he discusses this, we go into a room that is a tribute to Root Beer Tender & Reggie:
Lionel says to Reggie that he's sorry, and he misses him.
This is pretty sad because it reveals that Lionel might not have hated Reggie as much as Reggie thought he did. If only Lionel could have known Reggie was still out there. . . But alas, it was not to be.
Oh yeah, and here's a stinger for you: when the game ends, it closes automatically, and this happens on your IRL desktop:
[previewimg=33563376;sizeFull,f

Here are the objects from The Hex that appear in Beneath The Surface, along with some other strange catches.
There is a special item you can get, but that will be discussed in "The Secret Locket & The True Ending".
Thanks to a comment by a Steam user named sachdaniil, I was able to find what I think is the last interesting item--theStrange Disk--by fishing between 56 & 57 meters. As you can see, the writing is some kind of scrambled code:
I was hoping the same cipher the cracked the locket's code would crack this one, but that was not the case. Inputting the completed cipher.cipher file and retrieving the Strange Disk shows this:
I did a bit of research, and it appears that the Strange Disk is related to Daniel Mullin's next game, Inscryption, which I haven't yet played. Perhaps there's a cipher in that game that solves the Strange Disk's code? Could be!
If there are items I've missed, let me know & I'll go find them asap!
Also, to end this section, LOOK AT ALL THE FISH I HAVE! I am LOADED, holy crap!

Some things I found that I thought were interesting or worth preserving for some reason or another. I will expand this section as I find other cool stuff.
___________
When Moji dies, this appears. I tried to input the numbers into a binary translator, but got nothing. Maybe just gibberish.
Here's what happens if you go the long way to the dragon's lair in Secrets Of Legendaria!
If you use the Mimic Charm to copy Missingo's moves, Chandrelle gets a glitchy-looking attack added to her list. The description is in binary code. When translated, it's repeating the word, "Entervale". That word is your key to SoL's biggest secret, which I discuss in the section Welcome To Entervale..
Did you spot Jeremiah hiding in the barrel in SoL? If you click the barrel, it jumps.
WHO is floating in the fog??? WHO IS THAT?????
When I first helped this wizard (Wizario, I think his name is?) in Waste World, he said this line, and then Kindle on my computer opened for some reason??? But whatever was trying to open didn't show up properly. The second time I helped Wizario, he gave me scrap instead. I wonder what that Kindle thing was all about. . .
Carla made the Boss Mod?! Oh snap!
If you use the Kill cheat in Sado's section of Waste World, this happens, and the game crashes! AH!
Same thing that happens when Moji dies happens if you kill Mr. Squarrel.
This is a section of Waste World, the one where Sado psyches Rust out as Rocky. Does anybody know what these numbers mean?
Oh, and when you load Hardcore Mode, you get this screen.
Some of the dialogue that appears in the NPC detention center scene:
You can have a detailed conversation with the biker moglee when they return in Lazarus's section. I assume most people don't talk to them after they tell you how to turn on the elevator, as that was the case for me. Here's what they say:
I didn't realize this on my first playthrough, but Irving is talking directly to Lionel at the end of Lazarus's section.
A few different messages appear in the subtitles of Walk on multiple occassions. (The first two are the same, the last is different). At first it didn't seem to translate to anything, but thanks to user kitty's comment, I decided to try again. They appear to be the words "sado lives" followed by & mixed in with gibberish.
Some of the many fake articles that appear in The Hex.
Here's what Lionel calls himself in Walk (look at the top left corner).
The credits of Walk. I wonder if these people show up in any other games by the developer. . .
Creepy Sado ending stinger! GAH!
Finally, since you read the whole thing, have a cool endgame pic.

Let me know if you liked this guide! <3 And if you have any suggestions for secrets I should seek out, tell me!