Sethian

I got too excited by its similarity to Heaven's Vault and Chants of Sennaar and didn't read the reviews closely enough. It just wants you to repeat specific combinations of symbols to unlock notebook entries that explain everything for you. It doesn't give you the actual flexibility to decipher things on your own.

The thumbs up is because I like conlangs - read review to the end. The first half of the game is an interesting linguistic thought experiment. Talk with an ancient computer about their mysteriously absent people, in a language that you the player have to figure out on the fly. The in-game journal helps a lot at first, but after a certain point the only way to progress is to copy sentences from the journal word for word, and hope you don't mix up ' and `. I wish the interpreter understood more inputs, and was more consistent about whether proper nouns needed to be encased in the equivalent of Capitalization or not (or at least understood it when you got that wrong). I wish I could ask more general questions -- things like "where did the other people go", "why didn't everyone go", "what is your government", "when did they go", "did mr saydo do that too", "who made you", "what is hightime", "what do you want", "are you alive", "are you free", "I want to understand", "discuss (keyword)", etc. Being able to ask for the opposite of words like big and small and old and new. I also wish the grammar for complex sentences involving "that" or "about" had more clear usage examples with words that were already known. Maybe if the dev got playtesters to submit questions in sethian somewhere, and implemented answers to the most common (or interesting) 50 valid questions? Since the engine's done, it seems like adding more answers could be pretty fruitful to expand gameplay. As far as quality of life features, it would be incredibly handy to be able to left click on runes the computer said to me, to type them back in, instead of having to find them all manually in the keypad. Additionally, having a few very common-use symbols being either on the first page of the keypad (specifically "high") or having two pages of the keypad visible at once would be helpful to minimize paging back and forth. Having the computer's text visible via scrolling forward and back through the whole conversation would also be neat, instead of the current page-based system, but that's nitpicking. Overall, fascinating game if you love linguistics or cryptography. But if you hate railroading, you'll get frustrated around the time you unlock the word "why".

It is hard to recommend the game, which is very unfortunate in my opinion. It is an interesting game with nice language design. Sethianese is an SVO language, which makes it easy for nearly everyone to understand (according to wikipedia, 42% of the world language is in SVO, making it the second most common word order only less than SOV's 45%). Thus, I believe Sethian is not a particularly *difficult* or *super hardcore linguistic* game, but was made to be so on purpose through... not very brilliant ways. I will discuss the plot, mechanics, and endings of the game, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. I didn't put spoiler text cuz that will just make this review a giant black block. - Though the protagonist states that they didn't forget to bring the books written by the only two Sethianese scholars, you as player doesn't really have access to these two books, nor can you access the protagonist's notes as you wish (which is reasonable I guess since they're also learning while chatting). Only by inputting the right sentence as scripted by the game dev can you trigger a new page of journal to unlock, and new suggestions from the protagonist: try this, say that, what is X, what does Y mean, etc. This way of interacting makes the game very linear and most importantly, short. At the beginning, the game let you explore the interface and try out some basic sentence. When the dictionary soon unlocked, I read through it to learn that many letters still have no meaning known to scholars. I thought we could be able to crack all these mysteries and fill the knowledge gap, yet I just kept translating the protagonist's suggestions. I've seen other players call these suggestions "hints" or "guides", while I feel like they're just repetitive tasks. It is like the scenario in the Chinese Room argument, you don't have to understand the language, but you can still use it. You follow every syntactic rule, but understand no semantic meaning of any word. And this is why, I believe, the game's "difficulty" increased so abruptly right after the protagonist stopped giving suggestions. One needs to come up with what to ask, and what to respond. Yet here comes another challenge: the frustrating work of typing and re-typing. The Sethianese computer/AI seems to function only when everything follows the script, otherwise it wouldn't understand anything. I see people asking about why the computer can't understand their perfectly correct sentence in Steam discussion and in the guides' comment sections, and yeah it happened to me too. It is very frustrating. And the correct answer to the "Good Ending" is kinda... idk, understandable, but not something I would say. My biggest disappointment is not about the endings or the re-typing chore, but about the prescriptive usage of language and the remaining knowledge gap. By critically following a script written by the game dev, players lose their freedom to try out Sethianese and explore the Sethian culture. There are many complex letters we still don't know the meaning of, and maybe the reason why these letters resemble mathematical objects. To get to the Good Ending, we need to declare that we have "I-free" and can "front-do-all". In the two possible endings, we either sleep in forever simulations or rest with the hope of free will. Yet what I see and feel is that we are bound to the prescribed scripts written by the game dev. It's not a **bad** game, but it fails to tell a story that it intended to (or a story that I thought for so). But, idk, in the end, free will also means that you can regard yourself to be free, even if you aren't. It's up to you.

Such a shame there's no neutral rating instead of a like or a dislike. The concept of studying the language and philosopthy of an alien civilisation is phenomenal; unfortunately this is not a puzzle game — it's a walking simulator. The notebook guides the player question by question, sign by sing throughout the game, and asking almost any diffrent question will result in the computer responding 'I don't understand'. I feel like the game would have benefited from more side content and slower progresion that would have given the player the time and opportunity to actually learn the language on thier own, especially as vast majority of avaiable signs are completely useless.

This is a SUPER niche linguistics game. If you already played Chants of Senaar and Heaven’s Vault, check this out. Be aware that it’s very short and the game is very “journal reading” focused (I.e. you usually won’t figure out what a symbol means, it will usually be provided to you in a journal page). So don’t expect Chants of Senaar, but if you’re like, starved for linguistics games (I think there are only three in the world??? Is that true?) then check this out.

I wish there was a star-based rating because I wouldn't say this game was completely bad. When I got this game, I was hoping for something like Homicipher (a visual novel that's main mechanic is translating a language). In Sethian (and Homicipher), you can click on the words you see at any time to find their exact definition, and you can also access your dictionary at any time to look at all your words. In Homicipher you're defining the words said to you, whereas in Sethian you're using the words you learn to actually talk, or rather in this case, "input". In the video on Sethian's store page, you see an in-game notebook with notes and definitions. I assumed this notebook was for the player to write in, (this is a feature I love in other puzzle games, like The Nonary Game series), however I quickly found out the notebook was filled by the main character. At first I thought, "oh well, I'll just use my own notebook," but quickly found out that that wasn't needed either... In Sethian, you don't translate the words, your character does; And that might have been fine. The notes they write add context to the world. Plus they don't always know exactly what the words mean, so you'll have to figure out how to use them and how to understand the computer you're talking to, right? Right? Sort of. You can ask some questions independently, but a lot of those will be met with something like, "I don't know that." You can ask the computer if it's good, but not if another thing (that's important to the plot) is good. There is not a lot of flexibility about what you can talk to this thing about; Which again might be fine; That computer is only interested in one thing, (not that/j). What I found really annoying was that your character not only translates the words in the dictionary, not only translates the computer's sentences, but they also tell you exactly what to input (type)! It felt very disheartening when I realized this. It felt less like I was playing a game, and more like I was pressing complex buttons to advance the story. I tried to make it more fun by trying to translate what the computer was saying on my own, but it got pretty esoteric with the grammar and compound words that it didn't make it much more fun. (There's also a really annoying thing where you're supposed to ask a specific question right after the computer says something, and if you don't ask that exact question you have to go back and ask the previous question again. That was not my assumption about how the input-output worked. I was all trying to figure out the right grammar to ask the question right. I wouldn't have been able to figure that out had I not looked at a guide, which only made the conversation feel more lifeless.) I liked this game somewhat, I played it until 12am once, (and I'm not a night owl), but I found so many things immensely disappointing about it :/

Linear gameplay that does not encourage understanding and repetitive, hyper-specific phrasing required. The game had a lot of promise, but it is not what I was hoping for.

[h1]Лингивистическая головоломка без лингвистики[/h1] После прохождения [i]Chants of Sennaar[/i] и [i]Heaven’s Vault[/i], будучи окрыленным энтузиазмом, мне не повезло наткнуться в рекомендациях на [b]Sethian[/b]. Трейлер предвещал интересную задумку и увлекательный геймплей, однако на деле я был ослеплен красивым фасадом. Игра встречает брифингом из дневника с заманчивой фантастичной завязкой и сразу же выпускает в поле. Необходимо вытянуть из инопланетного компьютера все его секреты на языке его создателей. “Вот оно, пора расшифровать еще один продуманный новый язык!”, подумал я и сразу же был спущен с небес на землю. Компьютер отказывался реагировать на какие-либо команды, отличные от тех, что предлагал главный герой через записи в дневнике. Если вы, как и я, подумали, что это часть обучения - то мы с вами вместе сильно ошиблись… По сути, Sethian это новелла, рассказывающая неплохую историю в жанре фантастики. Местами иногда можно отойти от протоптанной дневником тропинки, чтобы немного расширить понимание лора. Но по большей части двигателем сюжета/прогресса будет лишь то, что указывает сделать персонаж главного героя. А указывает он максимально конкретно и буквально - “напиши то-то, спроси так-то”. Ну, могли бы и за меня написать тогда уж. Даже перевод фраз дополнительно сразу описывается в дневнике, не обязательно вникать в то, как работает [i]Сетианский язык[/i]. И хоть я все-таки вник, такой подход отбил у меня желание заниматься переводом на ходу уже после первого часа попыток. [u]В лингвистической-то игре![/u] Хочется отметить сам местный язык. Задумка мне действительно очень понравилась, но на одном концепте далеко не уедешь, и даже разработчики это понимали. Именно поэтому большая часть кнопок со “словами” не имеет вообще никакого перевода! Эти слова просто ничего не значат и были добавлены просто для создания вида. Касательно самого механизма языка сказать нечего - это просто элемент создания “головоломочности” происходящего. Он не создает характер другого народа, не задает тон общения. Учитывая, что я должен якобы общаться с инопланетным компьютером, создается ощущение общения с ребенком, который говорит заумью. В игре есть несколько концовок, что немного радует, но я сомневаюсь, что много кому захочется выискивать разницу. Оценив обе, могу сказать, что они, в общем-то, довольно философские для такой игры, но ложки меда будет мало в бочке дегтя. Если вас не напрягает расшифровка языка ради самого процесса - дерзайте, пробуйте. Меня лично хватило на один раз при всей небольшой продолжительности игры. [h2]Моя оценка: 5/10 - более-менее[/h2]

[h3]8/10[/h3] 打分主要是游戏体验。非常非常困难的图案文字解谜。刚玩时很惊艳觉得很有意思，但后面就卡关了。 怎么说，也不是广义的游戏不好的不推荐吧，主要是太难了+无汉化冷门+简中网络里找不到攻略，所以基本打不到最后吧。喜欢文字图案解谜的话就21r随便买来玩玩卡关也不亏。 ps：商店评测里也有吐槽剧情的 /游戏太线性不够开放的，购买前考虑这方面也可以看看。

NÃO. ABSOLUTAMENTE NÃO. JOGO PODRE HORRIVEL HORRIPILANTE. O DEV SCAMOU QUEM APOIOU E SUMIU COM O DINHEIRO.