Alephant is an elegant new puzzle game from Lucas Le Slo centered around symbols and language. Releasing today, the game arrives side-by-side with Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions in our ongoing Thinkathon: a week-long parade of puzzle game debuts.
If you've played any of Le Slo's previous games, you may know what to expect here: a minimal, understated aesthetic, themes of learning and understanding, and a generally cryptic nature that invites curiosity and exploration. Many of them focus on that truly fascinating transition from confusion to revelation to knowing something you didn't before, and Alephant is no exception.
Guiding an elephant around compact puzzle levels, you must help them learn the subtleties of the aleph, the first silent letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and how it combines with other characters to make sounds. Here Alephant deftly weaves analogies between games and linguistics: as the elephant comes to understand more letters and sounds, you the player are learning how these symbols interact mechanically in this puzzle world, building your knowledge of the “puzzle language.”
When it comes to games like Alephant, I tend to err on the side of saying less rather than risk over-explaining and dispelling too much of the puzzle-box mystique. Much of the charm, in my opinion, comes from finding things for yourself from the very beginning, not being exactly sure how to approach the game or where it might take you. I see this kind of experience as a carefully curated dig-site, each obstacle and level laid out meticulously like so many buried bones, begging you to take on the role of puzzle-archaeologist and slowly brush away one layer of sand at a time.
You can start digging up and deciphering the secrets of Alephant today on Steam. There are still plenty more Thinkathon games to come this week, so sign up for our newsletter if you want to be in the drawing to win some free thinky games.
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