The Tempest of Baraqiel

The Tempest of Baraqiel is a game in which the protagonist, military linguist Kel Shem, must decipher the settings on an advanced alien weapon so that humans can figure out how to operate the weapon and make a show of being able to hold their own against this superior foe.

Kel is also dealing with hostile superior officers, a lack of information they need to do their job, and the legacy of a famous mother that they’re struggling to live up to, and before you get to the translation stuff, you have to go through quite a lot of scenes of them trying to navigate interpersonal interactions around these things. Although the POV is exclusively Kel’s and they are unquestionably the main character, the player is often expected to select dialogue options for both Kel and their hostile superiors or skeptical team members, a design choice that I found somewhat odd and disorienting. I’m not sure what effect it was intended to have; for me it made it harder to fully identify with Kel and feel the pressure and frustration of navigating the situation they were in, and felt a little bit like I was playing both sides of a two-player game.

The translation sequence was absolutely the most compelling part of the game, and the part where I most felt like I knew what my goal was and what effect my choices were having. Even if you sometimes choose options for other members of the team in this section, at least you’re playing as members of a team with a unified purpose, not two people who are supposed to be clashing. Unfortunately I’m enough of a linguistics nerd to be bothered by how incredibly tidy and logical the language was—more of a code designed for puzzles than an actual language—and by the technobabble by which the characters sometimes reach realizations. I do understand that an accurate simulation of the process of deciphering an unknown language would take several years for the player to complete and be impossible to beat if you didn’t have a team of academics in relevant fields helping you out; I like to think I cut translation games some slack here. (I do love Heaven’s Vault!) But (Spoiler - click to show)“every word is exactly four phonemes and each position corresponds to a color and each phoneme corresponds to a number” is fully into “this is something I would expect to see in a puzzle hunt rather than while reading about real languages” territory. Even for aliens it seems like a bit of a stretch.

The game is definitely doing some intriguing things and some people seem to have gotten a lot more out of it than I did. I will confess to not being in the most charitable mood while playing most of the game, because I tried to play it in two sessions but, due to the faulty save function, ended up having to replay the first 1/3 and then rush to play the rest of the game in one sitting. But in the end I think it was not really for me.

Accessibility note: Due to the lack of light mode I had to use Stylebot to be able to play this game, so it was ultimately no more of a problem than a well-designed dark mode would have been, but I have to say the option buttons making the text darker and the background lighter was not a good choice. Once again I feel obligated to beat the drum of “please use a contrast checker!” (Some things pass that shouldn’t, so it’s not a guarantee you will not have problems, but it is the bare minimum.)

(Based on the IFComp 2025 version)

Finally! A breakthrough that could turn this war around. Your side has captured an alien gravity cannon. Think about what we could learn about their technology, not to mention the fact that we can shoot one of their own spaceship-shattering guns at them!
Unfortunately, we can’t figure out the controls. And it’s not like this thing came with a manual in French, Korean, English, and -Ayiq-, right?

Enter you, brilliant xenolinguist. Decypher the button-labels on this cannon, ASAP.
(Something small but grating: although the entire game is written in second person, always adressing you as “You”, you, the player, sometimes have the power to choose what other characters are going to say. So suddenly, I’m not choosing what “You” is going to say, but what the colonel will say to me.)

The setting and premise of The Tempset of Baraqiel are interesting.
-A far-future intergalactic war lends itself to exploring future space-bound battle strategies, or the futuristic high-tech gizmos-that-go-boom and the massive destruction they wreak.
-Contact with an extraterrestrial highly intelligent civilization brings up questions about their culture, their social organisation, the way their specific biology shapes their intelligence and their interaction with the world.
-Exolinguistic research of a foreign artefact makes me think of an intergalactic Rosetta’s stone, or the (im)posibility to find common ground by delving to the bare foundations of communication, understanding an alien mind through the way its language is structured.

And The Tempest of Baraqiel touches upon all of those. It just never bores down beneath the surface to get at the heart of these hard questions. In its defense, it’s a war scenario taking place in the outreaches of both races’ territory, and except for shooting at each other and intercepting broadcasts, both sides don’t have the inclination nor the opportunity to get to know each other more closely (except for information about how to kill each other more effectively, I assume). There’s also a hint of [Top Secret] material that simply isn’t available to our research team.

The one thing that is undeniably, tangibly, 1+1=2, at our disposal is this version of a Rosetta’s stone, the cannon with its labelled buttons. We know what the buttons on a weapon should do, so that gives us a strong lead on how to interpret at least the minimal set of words or instructions inscribed on the controls of this weapon.

Alas! At least in my playthrough, the deduction of meaning through research of the script’s features (frequency of sounds/symbols, colour of syllables, onomatopeic structure, all very interesting) never led to a breakthrough. Instead, when the -Ayiq- spaceship was right overhead, I was given one random guess and then reduced to erratically smashing all buttons in the hopes of hitting “SHOOT”.

The story leading up to this finale felt similarly promising but ultimately unsatisfying.
-You’re the appointed leader, so gameplay allows some management of your relation with the members of your team, mostly coming down to choosing between a casual or a strict leadership style. On the other side of the hierarchical scale, you need to manage your relation with the bosses, prying loose as much information and privileges as you can while not appearing too disrespectful. Unfortunately , I kept feeling the characters as empty actors, there to say their lines and step back behind the curtains.
-Kel Shem, the protagonist, is poorly sketched, promising more substance at first than what is ultimately given. There’s mention of some angst about your militarily decorated (and dead) mother, and your choice to work far away from the army’s attention on your exolinguistics research as a possible consequence. Even so, while it feels like this might be a big deal later in the game, it’s skimmed over without bearing any weight later in the game.
-The character I did enjoy coming alive was Martov. With her, backstory and behaviour and style of conversation did come together to form a separate individual. (Dramatic details like being legless in a wheelchair(I’m leaving this in because I think it’s funny. I completely fused Martov with the legless character Billy Reston from House of Leaves, which 'm reading now.) limping around with a cane ready to knock some heads should the occasion present itself certainly helped…)
-Another character that I found very intruiging was the assistant drone XC_7A04. There’s a brief mention of its consciousness/intelligence being shared in a ship-wide datacloud with all the other AI-s present, raising questions of individuality vs hivemind, subservience of such a powerful intelligence to the humans who control them,…
When first meeting the drone, the protagonist even asks whether it has a name.

The drone pauses just long enough for you to notice the hesitation, and then continues on.

“My previous assignee was not of the view that service drones should have designations. My serial number is XC_7A04.”

And then… nothing. It just hangs there. Sure, we proceed to call it XC for short, but there is no more acknowledgement of the profound implications of this statement by the drone.
A balloon of narrative promise carried away soundlessly on the breeze.

I found the writing to be adequate, not more, but certainly nothing less either. The descriptions allowed me to clearly imagine the surroundings and other characters. I also enjoyed the tension in the scene with the Captain’s shuttle approaching the -Ayiq- spaceship while we were frantically trying to get the cannon working.
In general though, I couldn’t shake the disappointment over the many underdeveloped opportunities.

The fact that I’ve written at length about The Tempest of Baraqiel testifies that I truly feel there’s a great game, a great story, a great backstory in it. This version (or first installment?) just promises too many things that it doesn’t follow up on.

Lately I’ve been getting back into Star Trek. There’s an element of nostalgia to it, certainly, that gets increasingly appealing as my age keeps ticking ever-upwards, and its optimistic vision of humanity makes for a nice change of pace from the evil currently consuming America. But actually the thing that I find most soothing about it is what’s been dubbed the “competence porn” angle: The Next Generation especially is a show where a bunch of high-functioning professionals confront challenging problems, hold meetings to brainstorm ideas and develop a plan of action, then despite whatever twists and turns the galaxy throws at them, save the day in 43, or at worst, 86 minutes (until DS9 came along and ruined things with its three-parters and seasons-long arcs). In this time of chaos, seeing people be good at their jobs is basically my ASMR.

The Tempest of Baraqiel cites golden-age sci-fi as its immediate inspirations, and its setting is far more militarized than the Federation: here, humanity is locked in a losing war against an implacable and cryptic race of crab aliens. But it definitely occupies adjacent territory. As a young exolinguist, you’re assigned to a warship and given a secret mission to decode enough of the aliens’ language to operate one of their weapons. Through a well-paced adventure that’s only a bit longer than a Star Trek episode’s running time, you’ll motivate your team, look for inspiration to get through blocks in your research, and yes, have a bunch of meetings with your superiors (in fairness, you can also get into a fistfight in a knock-off of the Enterprise’s Ten Forward bar, if you want). Kal Shem, the protagonist, is young and has some anxiety to living up to the example of his war-hero mom, but at least as I played him, he’s really good at sweating the details and playing the bureaucratic game – at least until things went off the rails in the endgame.

The game definitely puts its best foot forward, though. The custom choice-based interface is clunkily sleek in that 80s-sci-fi way, with low-poly 3D renders in the corner illustrating the ship and its locations (admittedly, I mostly stopped noticing it after the first scene – likewise, there’s a custom music system that I can’t offer an opinion on since I didn’t listen to it). There’s a fair bit of world-building to get through, but it’s managed with a deft hand, and if there are few sequences where characters explain things they both already now to each other, that’s part of the charm of old-school sci-fi – mostly the infodumping comes with some character backstory or a reasonable explanation for why someone needs seemingly-basic context. Some of these circumstances can feel a bit contrived, most notably the fact that Shem isn’t a specialist in this particular alien language, so he seems an odd choice for team leader. But his family’s military background means he’s seen as more reliable for an assignment that requires discretion, so I was willing to go with it.

Baraqiel’s approach to interactivity is also nothing fancy, but well done. There’s a high density of choice – there are very few passages where you just click “next”, and there are both a reasonable number of what seem like significant branch points where you can take a different strategy on your research assignment, and more low-key choices that are either cosmetic, or might have a mild impact on your team’s opinion of you. Interestingly, you’re not restricted to making choices for Shem alone; from time to time you can pick actions for another character, sometimes even an antagonistic one. I was typically too gun-shy to lean into creating conflict in these situations – like I said, that’s not what I go to Star Trek for – but it’s a nice option for players more interested in orchestrating an engaging story than getting by with a minimum of fuss.

As for the prose – well, would you be surprised to learn that it’s largely straight-ahead, but well-crafted? The one distinctive note is that many of the characters use Yiddish slang, like dybbuk or macher; I’m not sure whether a passage I missed laid out the in-universe reasons for it, but it’s a touch I enjoyed (I also know enough Hebrew to understand that “Shem” means something like “name”, which is apropos enough for a game centered on linguistics).

There were a few small flies in the ointment as I played – most notably, the save/load system bugged out, recording only the first time I pushed the save button and not any of the others, meaning that when I tried to rewind a late-game choice to explore other options, I got sent nearly back to the beginning. Meanwhile, only one of Shem’s teammates gets much in the way of characterization. Still, I was having quite a good time as I headed into the game’s third act, which serves as the endgame – but unfortunately that’s when things started to fall apart. The methodically-paced research process suddenly leaped ahead with one flash of insight after another, not all of which made much sense, including a final revelation that seemed hard to swallow <spoiler((surely if the alien language was crafted to be comprehensible over the static of interstellar communications, the humans would have already had to understand and craft a similar solution to this problem when they encountered it over their centuries among the stars?))</spoiler). The climax also forces a conflict with one of Shem’s superior officers who I’d managed to cultivate a solid relationship with; I was deeply confused by why Shem suddenly seemed to be edging right up against mutiny for what appeared to be no good reason, regardless of trying to pick the more conciliatory options. And the ending passage I got was exceedingly compressed and anticlimactic – while the game seemed to be building up to a moment when you’d actually communicate with the aliens, or at least operate their weapon, neither of those came to pass, and the scant few paragraphs that tie off the game were also sufficiently ambiguous that I wasn’t sure what was meant to have happened, or why.

My guess is that the author ran out of time as they got to the end of what’s by any measure a big, responsive, and high-production-value game – it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to a first-time Comp entrant, and it certainly won’t be the last. So even if Tempest of Baraqiel’s final act lets it down somewhat, there’s still more than enough competence on display in the majority of its runtime to scratch that meetings-and-science-and-space-adventure itch.