I think there is a fantastic game in here somewhere, and I really enjoyed my time playing it. The mystery and world are fun and fascinating to uncover and explore, the music is perfect for the setting, the writing is great and the character interactions in particular are endlessly intriguing to watch unfold. The core game mechanic of translation is fun and novel, and is the closest I've had a game come to making me feel like a real archaeologist. Despite all the problems I'm about to list I really liked this one and do highly recommend it.
Unfortunately, the game just really isn't made very well at all. I was constantly battling with cameras clipping through terrain, music cutting out for no real reason or characters getting stuck in corners and glitching out completely. While the presumably hand-drawn character models are great (albeit with an animation style that wasnt to my taste), a lot of the scenery textures seem weirdly low-fidelity. These things combine to make the game feel quite dated at points, despite its 2019 release date.
There are also a lot of design choices in the game that are... frankly, a bit baffling. The game loves taking control away from you to autowalk the character for sometimes only a few metres, and the sudden lack of control can be quite jarring. A lot of things that it would be nice to be able to do (e.g. put the ship on auto-fly, teleport back to ship after finishing a location, etc etc) feel like they should be things the player can choose to activate, but most of the time you just have to sit there and hope you hit the cryptic conditions for the relevant prompt to appear for you for 2 seconds. And I would give my left foot for a dictionary mode where you can just see all the words you have translations or guesses for; there even /is/ a dictionary in universe for God's sake, Aliya very regularly mentions it, so why can't I see it?
Then there are more quality of life things. Why can you not revisit locations? I guess I can understand not wanting the player to revisit dig-sites to keep the game flowing, but at least 2 locations are populated towns that you can't go back to unless the game itself deems you have cause to. Certain actions in the game seem to take far more of your time than is respectful (e.g. Huang looking through his lists to show you an artefact, Six being silenced). And /by God/ does the player character move slowly; a real irritant in some of the larger locations in the game.
Early in the game, I really thought all these things would get to me. But by the end, I barely noticed most of the problems were there. Despite everything, the game totally sucked me into its world. And if a game's core can shine so brightly through so many layers of problems, then that truly must be a bright core indeed.
Unfortunately, the game just really isn't made very well at all. I was constantly battling with cameras clipping through terrain, music cutting out for no real reason or characters getting stuck in corners and glitching out completely. While the presumably hand-drawn character models are great (albeit with an animation style that wasnt to my taste), a lot of the scenery textures seem weirdly low-fidelity. These things combine to make the game feel quite dated at points, despite its 2019 release date.
There are also a lot of design choices in the game that are... frankly, a bit baffling. The game loves taking control away from you to autowalk the character for sometimes only a few metres, and the sudden lack of control can be quite jarring. A lot of things that it would be nice to be able to do (e.g. put the ship on auto-fly, teleport back to ship after finishing a location, etc etc) feel like they should be things the player can choose to activate, but most of the time you just have to sit there and hope you hit the cryptic conditions for the relevant prompt to appear for you for 2 seconds. And I would give my left foot for a dictionary mode where you can just see all the words you have translations or guesses for; there even /is/ a dictionary in universe for God's sake, Aliya very regularly mentions it, so why can't I see it?
Then there are more quality of life things. Why can you not revisit locations? I guess I can understand not wanting the player to revisit dig-sites to keep the game flowing, but at least 2 locations are populated towns that you can't go back to unless the game itself deems you have cause to. Certain actions in the game seem to take far more of your time than is respectful (e.g. Huang looking through his lists to show you an artefact, Six being silenced). And /by God/ does the player character move slowly; a real irritant in some of the larger locations in the game.
Early in the game, I really thought all these things would get to me. But by the end, I barely noticed most of the problems were there. Despite everything, the game totally sucked me into its world. And if a game's core can shine so brightly through so many layers of problems, then that truly must be a bright core indeed.