The Apothecary of Trubiz and Once Glorious Artahk both released in the last few weeks, and both are new games with old-world settings that feature strange symbols and forgotten languages you must piece together while centering around very different kinds of puzzle gameplay.
First up, The Apothecary of Trubiz deals very directly with deciphering a text you start out with no knowledge of: you're showing up to your first day as the new apothecary (potion brewer) in town, but for reasons I'm not entirely sure of, all the tomes and manuals in the potion shop are written in a completely alien alphabet. Perhaps you came from a land very far away and the people here speak a different language: whatever the cause, it's pretty much a nightmare scenario for being a pharmacist and giving out medicine.
People will come to you for various cures, and as you start to deduce and hazard some guesses at what these foreign words could mean, the game will allow you to fill in these attempted translations yourself so that very slowly your books and conversations will transition to English. (This design of allowing a player to spell out their ideas of translated words one by one reminds me a lot of the short webgame Lost in Translation, which we just featured in our newsletter Thinky Games Club a few weeks ago.)
Once Glorious Artahk, while it too deals with strange languages and is also named after a fictional place with a funny spelling, is a pretty different kind of puzzle game. In this top-down adventure style game you're roaming the ruins of an ancient civilization, encountering various artifacts and areas to explore, many of which feature carved remnants of an old script lost to time.
The language aspect seems to be a little less front-and-center here, with some individual puzzle types dealing in arcane symbols, and then a separate system of discovering long lost words of power that, when written into your magical journal, will unlock big passages of history and lore of this forgotten place. Of interest to me was the mention that "the lore presented here is more than just set dressing—you’ll need to use what you learn from the Tome to solve certain puzzles..." which suggests engaging with the story elements will be important to progressing through the game.
Both The Apothecary of Trubiz and Once Glorious Arnahk are available now on Steam with launch discounts.
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