Epigraph Reviews

If you liked Chants of Sennaar, you will probably like this game. It's all about deciphering a fictional language. Unlike Chants of Sennaar, the game does not give you many clues to get started so it is more challenging. It's also a shorter game. A common complaint is that this game can be slow to get started. Once you figure out a couple of key facts about the structure of the language, you will start to make progress. Fair warning that there are a few inconsistencies in terms of the language - though maybe this was intended as all languages have rules and then certain words that seem to break the rules? There are also a couple of bugs at the end game that might prevent you from triggering the conclusion. Despite a few flaws, it's a very good language decoding challenge and it is quite affordable so it really does not need to be that deep or polished.

A short, tricky, language-learning/linguistics puzzler with great style. No hand-holding in the slightest; get ready to fill out a couple notebook pages and get stumped a few times before finding some of the well designed break-in points.

A tight, unadulterated game about deciphering a language. I needed a tip from another Steam review but once I got a foothold it was very satisfying to have things click into place. I certainly didn't figure out everything in the game and I appreciate that you don't need to in order to complete it. I found this much more engaging than Chants of Sennaar, which I unfortunately didn't finish due to all the walking around.

decipher a language using seven artefacts and two scraps of paper. good luck bozo

Yes it's really hard with little feedback on whether or not you're on the right track, but if you can get over the hump of finding the break in, it's actually quite fun. Someone made a guide called hints without spoilers, and I would highly recommend it if you're like me and not sure how to get started. Once I was started it all flowed nicely and I finished in 5 hours or so with only a few nudges. I'm always on the lookout for puzzle games with a narrative that don't involve walking around and invariably getting lost (doctors say I have what's called directional insanity). I'm very happy with this purchase.

This game is amazing. It is definitely challenging, and offers nothing in the way of confirming whether your deductions as you progress are correct, but has such an elegant design that it doesn't need to. Just go into it with open eyes about the necessity of perseverance. I played through it with a friend, and felt that really added to the experience. Having someone else to bounce crazy ideas off and to second guess holes in the logic added another layer to my enjoyment, and I would highly recommend it (if you know another person interested in linguistics). A complete bargain.

Played it with a friend and we quite enjoyed it! It was fun having to decipher a language with minimal clues

I don't recommend, but please don't take that to mean this isn't a good, interesting, somewhat fun, and vastly novel/creative game. It is definitely all of those things, and I congratulate the makers on developing a puzzle that tries things I haven't seen in games before. Unfortunately, for all its creativity and genuine challenge, the game just doesn't quite come together cleanly enough to be a widely appealing experience. I am not sure I knew what I was buying when Epigraph went on special, but I think I was expecting a set of cryptogram puzzles where the aim was to unravel various letter-substitution ciphers. When I started the game, I realised I was looking at something quite different, and I was excited. After half an hour of poking back and forth, this looked like it was going to be amazing - a test to unravel a genuinely new language from limited clues. After an hour I'd made great progress on getting started. And then the game showed its design flaws, as I spent the next hour achieving practically nothing new, making educated guesses (as the game seemed to want me to do) only to have to keep undoing them when they didn't work. As someone who is usually great at word puzzles, this was hugely frustrating to me - and yes, some of that can be put down to just a reaction of my hurt pride, but at the same time, the lack of any sort of positive/negative player feedback is also to blame, as Epigraph throws you into a lake and says "Swim!" and then gives you NOTHING to confirm if you're on the right track or not. I absolutely LOVED the sensation of being in the shoes of a real historian and seeing what it must have been like for anthropologists and linguists throughout history who have had to tackle this task of interpreting lost languages for real. But for all that, the game designers seem to have forgotten that they needed to balance that experience (with all of its stress, dead ends, frustration and feelings of isolation) with some degree of gameplay mechanics that allowed the player to feel a sense of genuine progress, or, at the very least, a way to determine what they were doing right or wrong at certain key points. Instead, all you get is a flawed "completion" indicator on the menu screen, which is useless for tracking progress as it only shows you what percentage of the text fields you have written in, but not what percentage of your input is actually correct. There is an excellent hints walkthrough on the Steam forums, and even as a huge fan of word puzzles and codes, I wouldn't have got past the first obvious "chapter" of the game without that guide. It got me on track to be able to reason my way through a bit further, but then the game just kept dropping me back into darkness and feeling of being lost. It was one of the rare times when I literally gave up on a puzzle game, choosing to stop at what might have been the half-way point and just find and read through someone else's solution online. I just stopped caring. So I'm torn - as I said, I really like the feeling of "realness" of being thrown into something almost entirely on your own, with no help, no hints. The player IS the expert, and can't call on outside help. But after circling blindly for too long, it stops being a game. I can see where the designers tried to incorporate certain deliberately confounding elements or ideas, and sure, these provide a couple of enjoyable "aha!" moments, but because you get a couple of these early on, it means that when you get stuck later you can't help wondering if you're just lost because the designers decided to deliberately throw in more unnecessary confounders. The balance just didn't work for me. Long blah blah blah review. Tl;dr is Good concept, good feeling of what this kind of work would be like in real life. But insufficiently gamified for the average player, with assumption and guesswork being core mechanics in the mid- and end-game phases but no system to confirm your guesses, so there's a LONG period of blindness that I personally couldn't push through.