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 :^).
LordDarias
25 days ago