Sethian Reviews

I did not get very far in this game. I started taking written notes immediately, and based on the two definitions the game gives you at the start, I started trying to study and extrapolate the rest of the language. I feel like I learned a couple of things, but it was very slow going. The entire time I felt like I didn't really have enough information to go off of. Most questions I asked resulted in the same reply (presumably meaning something like "I don't understand"). The few that didn't were exciting, but I wasn't able to do much with the replies. I eventually gave up. Reading the other reviews, apparently you can unlock more journal pages by writing exactly what it's implying you to write. Even knowing this information, I don't understand what symbols I'd use for anything other than "you", "me", and "what". Even if I'm correctly understanding what it is the game wants me to write, I don't know how to write it (how am I supposed to get the symbol(s) for "friends"?). There apparently are no alternative paths for me to travel to get past whatever it is I'm not getting, so there's not much I can do. The premise of this game is very enticing, but I don't think the execution is there. Edit: After a bit more experimentation, I realized what had happened in my case. Asking "You are what" and "What are you" gets the same response from the computer, but only one of the two will actually unlock the next journal page. I asked the wrong one without realizing I had swapped the order, and that sealed my fate. There's also no sound or other indication that you have unlocked a new journal page, which is an odd QOL feature to be missing. It's clear to me that these issues could have been fixed with more playtesting. It's a shame that I bounced off this game so thoroughly, but it's still an interesting case study for games of this type.

It is hard to recommend the game, which is very unfortunate in my opinion. It is an interesting game with nice language design. Sethianese is an SVO language, which makes it easy for nearly everyone to understand (according to wikipedia, 42% of the world language is in SVO, making it the second most common word order only less than SOV's 45%). Thus, I believe Sethian is not a particularly *difficult* or *super hardcore linguistic* game, but was made to be so on purpose through... not very brilliant ways. I will discuss the plot, mechanics, and endings of the game, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. I didn't put spoiler text cuz that will just make this review a giant black block. - Though the protagonist states that they didn't forget to bring the books written by the only two Sethianese scholars, you as player doesn't really have access to these two books, nor can you access the protagonist's notes as you wish (which is reasonable I guess since they're also learning while chatting). Only by inputting the right sentence as scripted by the game dev can you trigger a new page of journal to unlock, and new suggestions from the protagonist: try this, say that, what is X, what does Y mean, etc. This way of interacting makes the game very linear and most importantly, short. At the beginning, the game let you explore the interface and try out some basic sentence. When the dictionary soon unlocked, I read through it to learn that many letters still have no meaning known to scholars. I thought we could be able to crack all these mysteries and fill the knowledge gap, yet I just kept translating the protagonist's suggestions. I've seen other players call these suggestions "hints" or "guides", while I feel like they're just repetitive tasks. It is like the scenario in the Chinese Room argument, you don't have to understand the language, but you can still use it. You follow every syntactic rule, but understand no semantic meaning of any word. And this is why, I believe, the game's "difficulty" increased so abruptly right after the protagonist stopped giving suggestions. One needs to come up with what to ask, and what to respond. Yet here comes another challenge: the frustrating work of typing and re-typing. The Sethianese computer/AI seems to function only when everything follows the script, otherwise it wouldn't understand anything. I see people asking about why the computer can't understand their perfectly correct sentence in Steam discussion and in the guides' comment sections, and yeah it happened to me too. It is very frustrating. And the correct answer to the "Good Ending" is kinda... idk, understandable, but not something I would say. My biggest disappointment is not about the endings or the re-typing chore, but about the prescriptive usage of language and the remaining knowledge gap. By critically following a script written by the game dev, players lose their freedom to try out Sethianese and explore the Sethian culture. There are many complex letters we still don't know the meaning of, and maybe the reason why these letters resemble mathematical objects. To get to the Good Ending, we need to declare that we have "I-free" and can "front-do-all". In the two possible endings, we either sleep in forever simulations or rest with the hope of free will. Yet what I see and feel is that we are bound to the prescribed scripts written by the game dev. It's not a **bad** game, but it fails to tell a story that it intended to (or a story that I thought for so). But, idk, in the end, free will also means that you can regard yourself to be free, even if you aren't. It's up to you.