Entry tags:
luckily history repeats itself so you don't have to bother trying the first several times.
I'm currently playing Heaven's Vault with my brother. To no one's surprise, I immediately love the linguistics puzzle game. I am pleasantly surprised by how well it pulls off a number of things, though, from the core translation puzzle to the player experience of navigating its world/its protagonist's relationships as an outsider. From the very first scenes, I've felt like an archeologist trying to make judgments about a time, place, and culture I know nothing about.
I'm especially impressed by how convincingly it feels like you're learning an unfamiliar language, despite all the obvious concessions to make it viable as gameplay. Like, the sentence structure is blatantly just English, but it never really matters because you're focused solely on learning the morphology, which is entirely foreign and, for a multiple-choice based system, impressively learnable rather than just guessable. There's no better feeling than working out exactly what something says before the multiple-choice translation interface becomes available, then seeing your answer right there waiting to be picked. My favorite moment from our last play session was spotting a two-word phrase large enough to be legible at a glance in the environment, thinking out loud through the unknown word's possible meaning based on etymology… and then having a moment of epiphany that doubled as a chilling emotional gut punch.
Oh, and the moment when you first hear spoken Ancient and have absolutely zero idea what's being said? Iconic.
My biggest complaint is that they slip into overly-literal translations of English word usage* on occasion. It's not that often, but it's always jarring when it happens. (And disappointingly, the game does seem to have fallen into an obvious linguistic plot hole that I'd previously thought they were doing an impressive job tiptoeing around. I honestly think the issue could have been sidestepped entirely, albeit with some tricky sleight-of-hand and a bit of suspension of disbelief, but apparently that was never the intention. :( Alas.)
* e.g., using the word for demonstrative that (i.e. the counterpart to this) in phrases like "the ties that bind". (Not a real example; I forget the actual phrase in question.)
I'm especially impressed by how convincingly it feels like you're learning an unfamiliar language, despite all the obvious concessions to make it viable as gameplay. Like, the sentence structure is blatantly just English, but it never really matters because you're focused solely on learning the morphology, which is entirely foreign and, for a multiple-choice based system, impressively learnable rather than just guessable. There's no better feeling than working out exactly what something says before the multiple-choice translation interface becomes available, then seeing your answer right there waiting to be picked. My favorite moment from our last play session was spotting a two-word phrase large enough to be legible at a glance in the environment, thinking out loud through the unknown word's possible meaning based on etymology… and then having a moment of epiphany that doubled as a chilling emotional gut punch.
Oh, and the moment when you first hear spoken Ancient and have absolutely zero idea what's being said? Iconic.
My biggest complaint is that they slip into overly-literal translations of English word usage* on occasion. It's not that often, but it's always jarring when it happens. (And disappointingly, the game does seem to have fallen into an obvious linguistic plot hole that I'd previously thought they were doing an impressive job tiptoeing around. I honestly think the issue could have been sidestepped entirely, albeit with some tricky sleight-of-hand and a bit of suspension of disbelief, but apparently that was never the intention. :( Alas.)
* e.g., using the word for demonstrative that (i.e. the counterpart to this) in phrases like "the ties that bind". (Not a real example; I forget the actual phrase in question.)
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