I love this trend of figure-em-up's like Obra Dinn and Curse of the Golden Idol so if a new one comes my way, I will gobble them up so when multiple games media personalities I follow recommended this, I had to check it out. It's an extremely well made game in the genre but adds a lot of flavour and depth to the puzzles by making it about languages and translating them.
The presentation is excellent all around with beautiful graphics and a lovely soundtrack. The textures are mostly flat but the game still manages to leverage its minimalist art style with great effect for some gorgeous scenery. There's an almost imperceptible little hatching effect going on in the shadows which is a neat touch. The soundtrack has a fair amount of variety and is very lovely but mostly stays out of the way, only swelling in the major moments and mostly leaving you in almost silence as you figure the puzzles out.
This is primarily an adventure-puzzle game where you explore the tower you start in, slowly making your way higher and higher and meeting multiple peoples who all speak different languages. When someone talks or you see a sign or written text, you enter the characters into your notebook and have to figure out what they mean. As you keep exploring each area, you'll come across clues that help you make sense of each word. For example, if you see a lever with two marked positions and one keeps a door open and the other keeps it closed, you could safely guess each word to mean "open" and "closed". You could also get context clues from what a person is saying and the gestures they make, where they are, what they are doing and so on. At certain moments, the player makes (gorgeous) illustrations in their book and you can place each word in the slot next to an illustration so you'd place the word you guessed as "open" next to the illustration of an open door. Much like Obra Dinn, filling out a double page of illustrations with all correct words will "lock" your translations in place and the words will be properly translated. This makes for an incredibly refreshing experience each time you stumble onto the abode of a new tribe and you're completely lost trying to figure out what anything means. What the people there say will sound like total gibberish unless you properly translate the words in their sentences at which point they make total sense and the dialog flows naturally in a brilliant facsimile of learning an actual language and how improved fluency changes how you understand the person speaking it. The theming of the Tower of Babel, the exploration of ideas of plurality and multiculturalism isn't just set dressing. This is also primarily a puzzle adventure a lot like a point-n-click so there are multiple places where you need the proper "ingredients" to solve something and they mostly all strike a balance so they aren't too hard or too easy. The game also has a few stealth segments and they are annoying but aren't frequent enough to affect my experience much.
There are a few small things that detracted from my experience and they're mostly to do with the exploration. Some of the areas are pretty big which necessitated a lot of trial and error in figuring out where you're supposed to be going and what you may have missed. I'm sure playing without a map was the intended experience since there's a couple of proper mazes that will turn you around but I wish there was a Hollow Knight style simple map that gets more fleshed out the more you explore and find areas. Some areas are annoyingly too large and you have to spend a fair amount of time waiting for your character to walk across while you twiddle your thumbs for a couple of seconds. The camera is also a bit of an impediment here and doesn't show you the entrance to the next area unless you walk to it making you click multiple times to move your character when I'd rather just have them automatically walk to the next area. The difficulty also doesn't scale well because, in my opinion, the first area remained the hardest with the final area being really short and more of a victory run.
Aside from the small complaints, this was a lovely, challenging and wonderful puzzle game that has a lot of heart. Highly recommended to aficionados of puzzlers.
The presentation is excellent all around with beautiful graphics and a lovely soundtrack. The textures are mostly flat but the game still manages to leverage its minimalist art style with great effect for some gorgeous scenery. There's an almost imperceptible little hatching effect going on in the shadows which is a neat touch. The soundtrack has a fair amount of variety and is very lovely but mostly stays out of the way, only swelling in the major moments and mostly leaving you in almost silence as you figure the puzzles out.
This is primarily an adventure-puzzle game where you explore the tower you start in, slowly making your way higher and higher and meeting multiple peoples who all speak different languages. When someone talks or you see a sign or written text, you enter the characters into your notebook and have to figure out what they mean. As you keep exploring each area, you'll come across clues that help you make sense of each word. For example, if you see a lever with two marked positions and one keeps a door open and the other keeps it closed, you could safely guess each word to mean "open" and "closed". You could also get context clues from what a person is saying and the gestures they make, where they are, what they are doing and so on. At certain moments, the player makes (gorgeous) illustrations in their book and you can place each word in the slot next to an illustration so you'd place the word you guessed as "open" next to the illustration of an open door. Much like Obra Dinn, filling out a double page of illustrations with all correct words will "lock" your translations in place and the words will be properly translated. This makes for an incredibly refreshing experience each time you stumble onto the abode of a new tribe and you're completely lost trying to figure out what anything means. What the people there say will sound like total gibberish unless you properly translate the words in their sentences at which point they make total sense and the dialog flows naturally in a brilliant facsimile of learning an actual language and how improved fluency changes how you understand the person speaking it. The theming of the Tower of Babel, the exploration of ideas of plurality and multiculturalism isn't just set dressing. This is also primarily a puzzle adventure a lot like a point-n-click so there are multiple places where you need the proper "ingredients" to solve something and they mostly all strike a balance so they aren't too hard or too easy. The game also has a few stealth segments and they are annoying but aren't frequent enough to affect my experience much.
There are a few small things that detracted from my experience and they're mostly to do with the exploration. Some of the areas are pretty big which necessitated a lot of trial and error in figuring out where you're supposed to be going and what you may have missed. I'm sure playing without a map was the intended experience since there's a couple of proper mazes that will turn you around but I wish there was a Hollow Knight style simple map that gets more fleshed out the more you explore and find areas. Some areas are annoyingly too large and you have to spend a fair amount of time waiting for your character to walk across while you twiddle your thumbs for a couple of seconds. The camera is also a bit of an impediment here and doesn't show you the entrance to the next area unless you walk to it making you click multiple times to move your character when I'd rather just have them automatically walk to the next area. The difficulty also doesn't scale well because, in my opinion, the first area remained the hardest with the final area being really short and more of a victory run.
Aside from the small complaints, this was a lovely, challenging and wonderful puzzle game that has a lot of heart. Highly recommended to aficionados of puzzlers.