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A tricky one, but a good one. Use a handful of artefacts written in a long-dead language to uncover an ancient secret.
This is a cut above the usual videogame language puzzle. I'm having trouble saying why without spoiling how to solve this game or any other game I might compare it to. Probably the closest comparison is Chants of Sennaar, but that game had frequent confirmation steps so that you could never go too wrong with your translations. Epigraph is not going to catch you when you fall. You've got to tread very carefully, remember all the assumptions and guesses you've made, and be willing to scrub a lot of work if something looks very wrong. You won't know you've got it right until you get it all right. But God it feels good when you get it all right.
Two things bug me slightly. First, one of your resources is a handwritten letter to catch you up on a previous translator's efforts, but the font is tiny on my screen and I wish it was bigger. Second, I'm pretty sure one of the sub-puzzles ends up being ambiguous between what two characters could mean, so even if you get everything else spot-on you may have to do a little brute-forcing anyway. (But maybe I missed another clue somewhere. Not impossible that I'm just dumb!)
But as a whole the game is really satisfying. Very slick and confident, tough but fair, and with lots of interesting sub-steps that keep the core puzzle interesting to the end. Very nice.
This is a cut above the usual videogame language puzzle. I'm having trouble saying why without spoiling how to solve this game or any other game I might compare it to. Probably the closest comparison is Chants of Sennaar, but that game had frequent confirmation steps so that you could never go too wrong with your translations. Epigraph is not going to catch you when you fall. You've got to tread very carefully, remember all the assumptions and guesses you've made, and be willing to scrub a lot of work if something looks very wrong. You won't know you've got it right until you get it all right. But God it feels good when you get it all right.
Two things bug me slightly. First, one of your resources is a handwritten letter to catch you up on a previous translator's efforts, but the font is tiny on my screen and I wish it was bigger. Second, I'm pretty sure one of the sub-puzzles ends up being ambiguous between what two characters could mean, so even if you get everything else spot-on you may have to do a little brute-forcing anyway. (But maybe I missed another clue somewhere. Not impossible that I'm just dumb!)
But as a whole the game is really satisfying. Very slick and confident, tough but fair, and with lots of interesting sub-steps that keep the core puzzle interesting to the end. Very nice.
A very tight and focused language-based puzzle. Unlike the other linguistics-oriented games out there (Heaven's Gate, Chants of Sennaar), Epigraph presents you with a much more grounded scenario and places its language in a little bit of a wider (fictional) context to provide the player with tools for eventually deciphering it instead of presenting you with words in a vacuum and letting your character guess their meaning one by one. Due to the way the game is structured — namely, all the materials being available right from the start — Epigraph also doesn't need to fall back on the crutches of magically and definitively confirming when you've made a correct deduction, leaving a refreshing layer of ambiguity stretching over every piece of text. This approach is very fitting for an ancient lost language that you can kind of grasp but never truly master. Until the very end, you work off of what you yourself have established to be correct, and not what the game has told you is correct.
And this, in my view, is a very important distinction, since pretty much the entire game is based on making assumptions. You take the given information, extrapolate, then make a guess—no matter how informed—and see how well the results fit into a puzzle. With enough attention, most of the time you should be able to quickly get the feel for when the guess is entirely off-base or whether you're on the right track. So even without external validation, there are still breakthroughs to be had—both major and minor—serving as milestones and providing confidence that you are actually making progress and not just going around in circles.
The store page describes Epigraph as a short game, but I would argue it's only short in the same way a Rubik's cube is a 30-second puzzle. That may well be true if you're a savant or immediately click with the game, but for me, a former gifted child, it had a pretty decent runtime (around 9-10 hours), so I would absolutely say it's worth the already low asking price. Keep in mind that there is no grand mystery or stealth gameplay attached — all those hours are spent directly working with the language.
The presentation is neat and functional — the minimal interactive elements provide enough tools to keep track of your guesses and quickly try them out in different contexts, but not much more; so you are likely to need to bust out a notepad (or MSPaint if you're a real one for Mother Earth) at one point or another.
If this sounds interesting, and now you want to tinker around with an open-ended linguistic enigma, Epigraph is very easy to recommend. Join today, and you too may spend a few hours of your life walking back and forth mumbling to yourself about Makudovu and Pagomaru. Thanks Qwert :^).
And this, in my view, is a very important distinction, since pretty much the entire game is based on making assumptions. You take the given information, extrapolate, then make a guess—no matter how informed—and see how well the results fit into a puzzle. With enough attention, most of the time you should be able to quickly get the feel for when the guess is entirely off-base or whether you're on the right track. So even without external validation, there are still breakthroughs to be had—both major and minor—serving as milestones and providing confidence that you are actually making progress and not just going around in circles.
The store page describes Epigraph as a short game, but I would argue it's only short in the same way a Rubik's cube is a 30-second puzzle. That may well be true if you're a savant or immediately click with the game, but for me, a former gifted child, it had a pretty decent runtime (around 9-10 hours), so I would absolutely say it's worth the already low asking price. Keep in mind that there is no grand mystery or stealth gameplay attached — all those hours are spent directly working with the language.
The presentation is neat and functional — the minimal interactive elements provide enough tools to keep track of your guesses and quickly try them out in different contexts, but not much more; so you are likely to need to bust out a notepad (or MSPaint if you're a real one for Mother Earth) at one point or another.
If this sounds interesting, and now you want to tinker around with an open-ended linguistic enigma, Epigraph is very easy to recommend. Join today, and you too may spend a few hours of your life walking back and forth mumbling to yourself about Makudovu and Pagomaru. Thanks Qwert :^).