Probably the most ive ever been disappointed by a game. An enthralling mystery, writing on a notebook giddily trying to figure out the secret code and when I finally did so... deflated, utterly uninteresting, the worst possible answer the game could have had for how the code works. There's a story in the background here, but I was so dismayed I didnt care to look too deeply into it.
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@judgerussell I admit, its been a few months since I played it, but essentially its what's called a caesar cipher. I had a lot of fun as you said, inferring from context, association, learning new words helped me learn more words and some are fairly obvious (the calendar at the beginning is a dead giveaway of the numbers, the death tarot card etc) but it all felt like a very fun linguistic detective game. However, as soon as I realized that the "words" were made up of 26 characters alarm bells started ringing. No, surely not, I thought. Surely its not just a straight letter swap.
It wasnt, but I started to notice from my translations that the words had the same amount of characters in english as in the fictional language. I then remembered from computer science the concept of a caesar cipher and tested out a few settings using an online tool to see what the result was (i could have done it by hand but Im lazy). It wasnt quite right, but I believe in the end its a sort of modified caesar cipher where 1 letter is skipped if you go over Z. Knowing this was pretty deflating cause its just so... lame? And the cat was out of the bag so I kept using the tool to fill in the dictionary until the game ended and I was left really disappointed.
As for your questions, the developer is in fact japanese judging by their .jp email address but I genuinely do not know how it works in the japanese version. However looking at the comments on the steam page and other bits of info it seems that the words are based off english in terms of length so its reasonable to think that the language is based off it. Now whether or not this is cause the dev thought english language structure would be more challenging for a japanese audience or wanted the game to appeal mainly to english speaking westerners who would appreciate the ease of learning I can only speculate
It wasnt, but I started to notice from my translations that the words had the same amount of characters in english as in the fictional language. I then remembered from computer science the concept of a caesar cipher and tested out a few settings using an online tool to see what the result was (i could have done it by hand but Im lazy). It wasnt quite right, but I believe in the end its a sort of modified caesar cipher where 1 letter is skipped if you go over Z. Knowing this was pretty deflating cause its just so... lame? And the cat was out of the bag so I kept using the tool to fill in the dictionary until the game ended and I was left really disappointed.
As for your questions, the developer is in fact japanese judging by their .jp email address but I genuinely do not know how it works in the japanese version. However looking at the comments on the steam page and other bits of info it seems that the words are based off english in terms of length so its reasonable to think that the language is based off it. Now whether or not this is cause the dev thought english language structure would be more challenging for a japanese audience or wanted the game to appeal mainly to english speaking westerners who would appreciate the ease of learning I can only speculate
@LordDaria yeah and i suppose it's disappointing because if each word is related to an English word directly, you could still use bizarre symbols with no connection to the Latin alphabet and the game would work the same. (i guess heaven's vault does that)
@judgerussel quite, I enjoyed Heaven's Vault quite a bit
judgerussell
1 year ago