This one is interesting. It opens up with a note that the story is to be interpreted however you want. Which… Feels like a cop out.
Let me explain.
For those who don’t know, your character wakes up not knowing anything, nor even the language your rescuer is speaking. By interacting with the world like in many point-and-click games, the woman who helps you says what objects are. The words use completely different characters. One of the earliest hints to how to “solve” the game is an easy-to-understand object. From this object, you can figure out that each character corresponds to an English letter, and repeated characters in a word will always be the same letter. But after some more poking around, you will realize that that character will not always be that English letter.
I completed the first playthrough and only picked up a few words. But on my second, and I think the third, was when I was getting the hang of what was going on, I started adding more and more words. There are only a few moments that matter for what plays out and what ending you get, but the seven days are short enough, and you can go to sleep after waking up to force through the days.
Now that I’ve laid that out, here are my complaints.
The game does not confirm that your inputted words are correct. That might be the developer’s intent, but it doesn’t feel satisfying. If it did a Return of the Obra Dinn style “Confirm after a certain number of correct answers” or even word groups, it would have added a bit of satisfaction to it. Yes. I get that the game is intending me to interpret it as I wish, but I’m going to do that anyway. That is how art works. So, taking away the satisfaction that a game delivers inherently leaves me with a bit of an empty stomach, as it were.
Also, by poking around a bit in FAQs afterwards, I found out there are many endings. There are no achievements, which is fine. I don’t care about achievements, and tend to hate shit like “Achievement for starting the game, yay!” But there is nothing in-game to track the number of endings seen. Nor is there a way to start on a specific day of the story to skip over some of the stuff.
So, it’s neat, but I feel like it eschewed too many traditional game mechanics to try to make a point that I feel would have enhanced the experience. I mean, when I hit one event, I was genuinely shocked, and y’know, yeah, the dev said the game is open to my interpretation, but like, nah, that part was a bit too obvious to let that interpretation part slide.
Still had fun, though! It’s an interesting puzzle to crack, and the “story” as I interpreted it is a decent one. But I think most people would interpret it that way, and that’s fine.