Epigraph

打完了，想法是很好的，也比较硬核，但是： 1.最大的问题：不像是游戏，该有的反馈都没有。猜对还是猜错？不知道。单个字符还好，词汇大多数只能靠蒙，你也不知道蒙得对不对，毫无玩下去的欲望。甚至最后打开宝盒就只是打开而已，然后呢？有什么意义？没有。没有炫酷的动画和新剧情，只是打开了而已。 2.可能是有人玩完了巴别塔圣歌决定入手，但是巴别塔圣歌是将语言融入对话、场景，理解难度远比这个游戏低。这部更接近现实里破译死语言的感觉，难度是有的。 3.作者交不起电费吗，暗色背景+黑色文物是几个意思？语言学解密真就只看字是吧。 4.非得给那两封信写花体吗？ 5.一个我认为很奇怪的点：一个表音文字居然是靠词汇上方的符号表示词性？不觉得很奇怪吗。哪怕是给提示也太格格不入了 如果你能忍受以上几点，并且真的对语言学感兴趣，那就来玩吧，反正原价就挺便宜了，打折更便宜。

It's a game for puzzle sickos, if being completely stumped and wanting to tear your hair out doesn't make you think "Yes... Ha Ha Ha... Yes!" then I don't think you'd like it For those of us with something deeply wrong with us on the other hand,

Not how language works, not how translation works, too many leaps of logic necessary. Terrible font for the English text, unreadable. 0/10 try again

There might be a great game here, but I could not find it. Maybe I am not the audience, but after playing several other games about language and getting this one recommended I decided to try it. I could not figure out how to start on the puzzles, and after reading the guides I see that it requires you to make some assumptions that are really not justified. Just get Chants of Sennar instead, it is a so much better game.

推荐，非常纯粹的语言破译游戏，难度相比隔壁Cypher友好很多，不需要相关知识储备也可以玩。 难点在于开头给出的信息有限，你需要仅凭两张英文手写信，倒推出一门全新语言的发音、时态、词性和语义，并完成最终谜题打开宝盒。 游玩过程中时常感叹作者设计之巧妙，全程没有任何无效信息，搭配极简的画面和配乐，很容易进入心流状态。游戏的正反馈并不来自解出谜题，而在于顿悟的时刻，享受思考本身才是这个游戏的乐趣所在。

I could go either way on this game. The concept of publishing a cryptic message written in an esoteric language and then providing very little handholding is quite enchanting. And I do feel like the first half of the solution is reasonably fair for a sufficiently observant and patient solver. The game costs about a dollar when it's on sale, and many people could probably squeeze at least that much enjoyment out of the game. The problem is that there is no recognition that you've gotten halfway through the game and no reward for doing it anyways. And the second half of the game requires several leaps of logic that range form the hard-to-recognize to the downright illogical. The interface is hard to read, with zooming in constrained in inconsistent ways and the few handwritten text notes are written in a script that is similarly hard to read. The reward for the finishing the game, whether you somehow figured it out on your own or used a guide, is underwhelming and leaves you with even more questions than answers. In the end, the game leaves me wishing that they could have made the execution as good as the concept.

This could have been good. *sigh* Ok. Look. The premise is good, some bits are great, I had the occasional puzzle revelation while playing. But on the whole it left me very frustrated. I shouldn't even care so much about the weaknesses of a game that sells for so cheap, but it *could have been good*. * First of all, you can't zoom in as far as you want to, and you can't scroll left and right when looking at artifacts. That makes some bits of the text hard to read, which in this game is pretty inexcusable. * You have to press 'Enter' every time you type in a solution (transliteration/translation) for a character or word. This is such a small thing, but it's the only time I need to take my right hand off the mouse. It's awkward every time, and it happens a lot. It should save what you type as soon as you click away with the mouse. * You can only look at one face of one artifact at a time, unless you take screenshots. Fine, that's just a minor annoyance, but given that the game tries to help you in other ways (like highlighting every appearance of a character or word on the screen), it's just unhelpful. You can't move the notes around on the screen, either. * The game intentionally allows and provides multiple interpretations of transliteration, but the 100% achievement demands a specific one. * The game lets you fill in solutions (transliterations or translations) for characters and words, then populates every appearance of those characters and words with your solutions. Seems helpful, except that the "words" you write answers for aren't semantically complete, so they have different meanings in different places. There should have been an option to write solutions for the semantically complete units (if not units of arbitrary sizes, which you select yourselves). * Some words don't have enough information to be translated. They have solutions, which are logical, but it's pure guesswork. * The language just... feels off? Like, I don't want an actually realistic language (too complicated), but it would be nice to have one that *felt* realistic, you know? I'm not a linguist, other comments have talked about how the language doesn't make sense, but it was jarring in places.

Not that I regret starting this game. It was fun playing this game. But it surely has some 'frustrating' components in the game as others mentioned. My biggest complaint is [spoiler]math[/spoiler]. It is necessity to clear the game, but it stays ambiguous even if you know everything else. [spoiler]decimal including 0[/spoiler], [spoiler]ordering of digits[/spoiler], [spoiler]"THIS AND" notating addition[/spoiler]. It felt off to [spoiler]use well-known system without further explanation[/spoiler] considering how the game usually opens up wide possibility and let player deduce the answer.