Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa

Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa

This is a translation game, like a real-life version of Heaven's Vault or like The Gostak with a dictionary. It contains three connected mini-games imagined as 'tablets', all written in Hittite, transliterated to roman letters.

The presentation uses a great deal of graphics and typography, and the end result looks good. The user interface is clean and helpful, with a clickable compass rose and dynamic dictionary on the right side that presents a list of conjugated verbs which can be clicked on to type where to go.

I've played many games in non-English languages. Google translate is of course key, but I often use the IF Postcard in the respective languages as a starting point. Here, those basic commands are provided. I could see games having an interactive version of the IF postcard in the sidebar in the future.

Playing this game felt very different than playing other foreign-language games. Typically, the German, French, Spanish and Italian games I try were intended for fluent speakers in their respective language. On one hand, this is much harder as the words are quite complex (some Spanish authors love to do dialect, for instance). On the other hand, the game engines are often designed to respond to 'lazy' inputs. Verbs and nouns are often not conjugated or accept multiple endings, and markers like cedillas and umlauts can be omitted or replaced with shortcuts.

These games are designed to teach the player and to to be simple. So, for instance, the first level has simple puzzles like darkness and a ladder; the second one is a fetch quest, and the third is learning about social norms. Yet some of these easy puzzles are actually quite complex for non-native speakers, the kind of thing I often dread when playing such games (if we need chopped cheese for a quest and find regular cheese, do we assume the character will chop it themself or do we need to do so? etc.)

But the game has several layers of english help. Error messages are written in English, and point out the problems in our sentence formation. (I did have one issue early on where the game said the scribe had an error in a word and I assumed that meant the actual game scribe and that I couldn't refer to the object, but I had just used the wrong case ending). There are english translations of each word you click on, and invisiclues in English. I used no clues in the first game, but as I was trying to finish late at night, I used more clues for the other.

The third game contains nothing but reading and a logic puzzle, which I found most interesting in trying to read the clues, rather than the actual puzzling part.

The game is fairly violent, but it's all at a remove, since we are separated from the text by imaginary time and real language barriers.

This game is much more enjoyable than most education games I've played and much more smooth and player-friendly than most translation games I played. Hittite seems like a fun language, with some familiar aspects and some strange ones (like the particle starting every sentence).

Finally, this game is not like the Anpa Ma game from last year where the player has to use dictionaries and struggle alone, and beating it is a major challenge. This is a gently guided tour, non-trivial, but something most players should be able to do.

Some scattered thoughts:

• A lot of work went into the UI and translation mechanics. It looks amazing. Awesome stuff.

• The educational value of this game is off the charts. It does take a lot of mental work, between the puzzles and deciphering what's going on, but the result is worth it. My advice would be to resort to the clues early on when stuck.

• During the second adventure, I ran into some memory errors that necessitated restarting the game, but the dev pushed an update right afterwards that should hopefully stop this from happening. I think it's tied to complexity of input and length of game history, so the best way to avoid it - if you're paranoid that it might still happen - would probably be to save frequently and resort to the walkthrough when stuck.

• It wasn't immediately obvious to me that Bound Transcription in the settings is an option that can be changed to display everything in cuneiform. I knew that cuneiform display was an option because the main menu said so, but didn't realize that was the toggle for it. I wished I'd discovered it earlier, because it's fascinating to me to play through chunks of the game in cuneiform. My knowledge of it isn't good enough to play the entire game in cuneiform, however, and I found it made the 'double-click to insert' behavior more unintuitive since it was harder for me to decipher word boundaries. A lack of experience on my part.

Make no mistake, this is a very enjoyable game, especially if you're fond of linguistics and learning about different languages and writing systems. If I had to offer a main criticism, it would be that I wished the game focused more on grammatical features and aspects of cuneiform (e.g. what determines the cuneiform to Roman letter mapping? Are there certain aspects of cuneiform that get certain letters?) instead of puzzles, but this is bias on my part since I'm not hugely interested in puzzles.

Also, the second adventure made me hungry.

The comments below consist mainly of additional nitpicking.

• Semi-playable on mobile, which I initialy tried. The interface, typing, clicking and all that seemed to work fine - the default layout is large and packed with a bunch of things, but I made it work by zooming out and using landscape mode. But the one thing that didn't work was hovering over the grammatical cases of the different definitions to see what nominative, dative, and so on actually meant. I gave up on mobile pretty fast since I didn't feel like wracking my brain to remember the grammatical cases, and didn't feel like I'd get the complete experience without them.

• Can't copy-paste any in-game text. Annoys the part of me that wants to just put everything into Google Translate, but I just checked and Hittite isn't even available in Google Translate, so it's probably for the best.

• If there are multiple translation footnotes (parser errors), the older ones fade so only the newest is available, which is mildly annoying but I can't think of a better solution. Maybe if you could hover over the older parser errors to see them in full.

• First adventure took me about an hour. Fun, but I dislike that you can only (Spoiler - click to show)use the water in the pithos one time before it disappears (why?). The first time I accidentally used it to extinguish the torch instead of extinguishing the fire. Then I had to go to the riverbank and fill it again. Some experiences I had during the first adventure were akin to 'guess the intended command' (no 'guess the verb', as all available verbs are listed) since commands like 'put water on fire' didn't work and I had to use 'put pithos (with water in it) on fire' instead? Also, the aforementioned confusion between 'extinguish fire' and 'extinguish flaming torch'.

• Second adventure had more unintuitive puzzles in my opinion that made me resort to invisiclues. The part I got stuck on was (Spoiler - click to show)making the reeds last long enough. I forgot about the oil and became fixated on the idea of relighting the door bar with a flaming reed, since lighting the door bar worked in the first adventure. Then I couldn't understand why that didn't work.

• Third one I admittedly gave up on since it had been 3 hours at that point and I was tired. I actually identified the perpetrator on the first try, but didn't realize (Spoiler - click to show)I was supposed to dance towards him. I think I misinterpreted the tablets and thought that the king would kill anyone who danced or bowed, no matter who they were doing it to.