Epigraph

Epigraph is a language deciphering game about translating ancient, mysterious texts written on the sides of artifacts. Using notes from a fellow linguist who previously attempted to crack the code of the Nari language, you’ll have to assign meaning to each set of symbols. Due to the limited amount of given information and the stark interface, Epigraph is bound to make you feel like a linguist entangled with a long-forgotten language.

The text you’ll be deciphering is written on seven artifacts. These include tablets, a few statues with images on them that might give you hints about the words near them, and a stele. You can rotate the artifacts and zoom in on the writing. The language comes in the form of symbols put together to form words. When you hover over a symbol, all symbols of the same kind will glow. The same will happen for whole words, showing you where that word is repeated.

To start out, you’ll be able to refer to a letter containing all of the known information about the Nari language. Hopefully, the letter will point you in the right direction. Some of the clues include proper names, translated words from a similar language, and a translation of the passage on the stele. These might seem obvious, but they’re difficult to apply to the writing when you know nothing about the language’s sentence structure or phonetics.

If you make a discovery or feel like experimenting, you can fill in individual symbols or whole words. When you do this, the matching symbols or words across all artifacts will automatically fill themselves in. To decipher the Nari language, you may need to take your own notes along the way. Playing the part of a linguist, you’ll need to reconsider rules of your own language that feel intuitive: from sentence structure to how many sounds a single symbol denotes. Studying the text thoroughly is the only way to find patterns and eventually discover the rules of the Nari language.

This description was written by Cay Macres.