Endymion

Endymion is a work in the best tradition of science fiction, with a narrative concerning a not-quite-first-contact scenario and puzzles rooted in both mechanical and linguistic challenges.

Infocom's famous description of interactive fiction as something "akin to waking up inside a story" has often been repeated over the years, and some games (such as this one) invite that comparison on a literal level by having the story begin with the protagonist regaining consciousness. However, the more important aspect of the metaphor holds just as true for static fiction or film: Engaging with the media requires temporarily pushing aside one's own identity and adopting that of the protagonist. This allows one to vicariously feel what the protagonist feels, to experience the protagonist's trials and triumphs as though they were one's own.

That willing adoption of the protagonist's role is absolutely crucial in a puzzle game of any difficulty. Solving well-designed puzzles takes work, and players justifiably expect to be rewarded for that work. The best puzzles force the interactor to think in unfamiliar ways, to adopt a fundamentally different viewpoint than everyday life. This makes the breakthrough insight of a solution feel exhilirating, and confirmation of that insight by the game very satisfying.

Why am I boring you with this prosaic restatement of the obvious? Because Endymion absolutely nails that feeling in a manner that few games do. Indeed, in this carefully designed puzzle game, the protagonist's triumph in essence is the player's triumph; they are functionally one and the same.

The blank slate of the AFGNCAAP protagonist is perfect for the narrative, which very much feels like a late golden age short story from authors such as Larry Niven or Poul Anderson. The game design is remniscent of games such as Hadean Lands and Starcross, with the key to progress rooted in logic unique to the story but yielding to intuitions at least adjacent to everyday sensibilities.

What elevates this game to landmark status is the fabulous translation subsystem put in place to aid the player's exploration of the central mystery, that of the alien language which is quickly encountered and must be at least partially understood to reach the end. Author Daniel Stelzer significantly advanced the state of the art in IF here, crafting something that will surely be adopted by other authors in the future: a user interface that tracks the original context of all observed instances of alien words, allows the player to assign meanings to them, and produces provisional translations of alien inscriptions based on the meanings assigned.

Science fiction stories frequently portray the use of computerized translators in first contact scenarios, and Stelzer's translation subsystem is effectively one of these devices come to life and placed within the player's hands. It's a truly fascinating experience to see one's own hesitant interpretations challenged by obviously incorrect translations when encountering new inscriptions, and to try to reconcile the new data with what came before in order to replace or refine one's assigned meanings. Though I'm not a linguist, this work gave me a taste of what being one must be like -- it wouldn't surprise me if this game went viral and swept through the linguistics departments of the world's universities.

That's not to say that one must actually be a linguist in order to appreciate this game. Stelzer has released the source code for this game, and included with it is a complete translation of the miniature alien language. My own translations were significantly off in several respects, but that didn't stop me from reaching the end. Public comments by the author suggest concern that the puzzles were too hard, and if they depended on exact translation they might be. However, given that the language serves primarily to inform the game's associated mechanical puzzles, a somewhat fuzzy comprehension works well to reinforce the feel of the setting by maintaining a veil of mystery.

The capstone of Stelzer's achievement here is that the whole game was conceived and written in around five days. It's clear that the author's inspiration springs from a genuine passion for the subject matter, and I salute Stelzer for creating an experience that embodies a living spark of that passion.

A collision with an alien spaceship leaves you stuck on a planet, your ship destroyed, the alien ship still semi-functional. Explore it, figure out what everything does, and find a way to be rescued. Helpfully, everything on their ship is labelled, Adam West's Batcave-style. Unhelpfully, it's all greek to you. Alien-greek. A giant translation puzzle, like a scaled-up Ritus Sacri, or a scaled down Heaven's Vault, but with added gadgets and gizmos. It's extremely player-friendly: An on-screen map, built-in hints, external invisiclues, hyperlinked words: click on one to either examine it or try translating it... All your translations are available in the excellent "Vocab" section including where they were found and other objects that also bear the same words.

A compelling experience, technically polished and enjoyable. Difficulty marred the second half of the game: some of the logical leaps between (Spoiler - click to show)activating and using the teleporters and figuring out (Spoiler - click to show)the scanner is transmitting to the aliens seemed to be underclued (even in the invisiclues): it's difficult to deduce if you haven't already fully translated everything by that point, and it's very possible to just stumble into that situation without having a full grasp of the vocabulary.

(I was a judge for the inaugural episode of the Iron ChIF event, and this is the evaluation I wrote for that event. As such, it is organized around the scoring categories of Iron ChIF.)

Writing

The writing here is spare but effective, and the simplicity of it makes sense for a protagonist in this kind of survival situation. I appreciated the little looks we get at the protagonist’s personality and history; they are someone who once had big dreams and has been ground down by life, only for a dream to come true in a situation where they cannot at all appreciate it. There are little bits of pathos to it all—the ship named after your mother’s, the radio you can’t afford to fix—but most prominently the PC comes off as tired. They’ve been through a lot, and now something that should be an awe-inspiring experience is just one more thing to deal with.

The game also takes its opportunities to throw in details that make the alien craft feel truly alien—the interiors of enamel rather than metal, the unpleasant color that’s somewhat outside the human-visible spectrum, the mysterious darkness. Even the way they name celestial bodies suggests some complex system that we don’t know enough to understand. It makes sure that what should feel unfamiliar does, which is an important thing for any first-contact type of narrative.

It is definitely a puzzle-forward game with narrative, prose, and characterization as flavoring; the PC’s personal journey isn’t taking center stage here. But it’s effective flavoring, and very tasty.

Playability

I’m biased on this one as a multilingual person, dabbler in linguistics, and lover of language puzzles; I think I had an easier time of it than many people did. But I did like the language puzzle a lot and felt a lot of joy and excitement when getting a new word or finding a new instance of a word I’d seen before that helped me nail down its meaning.

I think the way the puzzles escalated made a lot of sense and I felt triumphant and smart at various moments when solving them. The thing that tripped me up was nothing so difficult as the language, but rather just your basic adventure game stuff. I got stuck for an inordinately long time at the red door, because the game said (Spoiler - click to show)(roughly translated) “turn coil to open red door”, but I was convinced I had to (Spoiler - click to show)touch the coil to the red door or somehow stick it in the red door, and none of the commands I tried to use to make that happen worked, and the hints were of no help… but then, is this the game’s fault if it told me in so many words what to do and I didn’t try (Spoiler - click to show)TURN COIL? Then at the end, I figured out (Spoiler - click to show)what message I needed to send with the device but didn’t realize I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)scan stuff to send it as opposed to speaking it or putting it into the device somehow, and spent a while spinning my wheels on that. Is that the game’s fault? Could it have stopped me from being an idiot? I’m not sure. But it did reduce my feelings of playfulness, whatever that’s worth.

Regardless of my idiosyncratically stupid experiences, from chatter during the play period I get the impression that the puzzles were pitched a little too hard for the average IF player and the hints weren’t quite the ones people needed at times, but I think this is something that would have easily been fixed if playtesting had been feasible.

Design

This game was extensively taking advantage of the abilities of Dialog. The interface for adding or changing translations was easy to use and I was happy to be playing a game in a system that could have that mechanic instead of requiring typing for all of that (or just making you keep track of it by hand). The automap isn’t really a necessity in this small of a game, but it’s a nice convenience.

It also uses options Dialog has for visual styling, with the inclusion of the cover image and light and dark mode CSS. The color schemes mostly look nice and fit the vibe of the game.

(Note: In light mode, the link text/background contrast is a little too low. I think the background could just be lightened a little and that would fix it—that’s what I did with Stylebot, anyway. A very understandable issue, though—I’ve done the same thing when trying to put together two color schemes in a hurry.)

In general, it’s just really identifiably a Dialog game, and for a less-used authoring system I think that’s very cool to see.

The puzzle design is also something the chef discussed during the process, and I think their planning for how to establish, build on, and then twist the puzzle mechanics shows through in the finished product—even if some of the puzzles could benefit from more scaffolding I think the basic structure of puzzle progression is good.

Inventiveness

Endymion clearly owes a lot to its forbears in the “translation game” genre, but it’s worth noting that this is a genre that has very few entries to date. I remember when I finished Heaven’s Vault (before Chants of Sennaar came out), I went looking for recommendations for similar games, and the recommendations were very sparse (and one of them, Tork, is no longer playable anyway). I also think the way that Endymion marries the language puzzle aspect to adventure game puzzling (decipher these messages to learn exactly how you should be manipulating these medium dry goods!) is fairly unusual—it has its forerunners in things like The Gostak but there’s nothing quite like it as far as I’m aware.

The premise of the spaceship crash in a remote location is an old one, in IF and elsewhere (actually, is it meaningfully distinct as a trope from the sea-shipwreck in a remote location, do we think?). But I do think that the goal being communication in an alien language gives the story a different core from many such stories, where the PC might repair the spaceship or devise some other clever method of escaping their situation. It’s a little less about self-reliance and a little more about striving for connection. (Or maybe it’s just about how aliens are cool??? I’m sorry, I have to get on my litcrit BS sometimes, otherwise what did I waste all that time in college for.)

Challenge Ingredient

It’s hard to imagine a dish more suffused with its challenge ingredient than this one. Both the device itself, as a physical object, and the nonhuman language of its messages are absolutely central to every puzzle in the game, as well as to the story overall. It’s integral, you could say, to both the “interactive” and the “fiction” pieces. Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider is a game about a fairy and a weird machine and, well, an ancient treasure and a secret spider, and Endymion is a game about a device that emits messages in a nonhuman language. What more can I say?