Grant Kuning set himself an impossible task when creating Sethian. Text parser games are already notorious for their inability to handle the full range of sentences players throw their way. One that operates entirely in an unfamiliar alien language is doomed from the start to magnify the inherent obtuseness of the form.

So it is that Sethian teeters between intense hand-holding, telling the player more or less exactly what to enter; and absolute inscrutability, with no clear way forward while the AI rejects even the most reasonable and well-formed sentences. I got the bad ending just by fucking around to see if I could find any sentence the game would recognize, and the good ending only by looking up a walkthrough online.

But despite its inevitable failure, it's hard not to be a bit intoxicated by the sheer ambition of what Sethian attempts to be. Where other games may incorporate decoding a language as a sidequest or step in a puzzle chain, Sethian makes it the heart of the experience. At its best comes close to the excitement of playing Her Story for the first time, feeling your way through a world of possible queries, the only boundary being your own limited vocabulary. It presents a challenge to designers who come after: what can you grow from the seeds that Sethian planted?