Endymion

This game was written in a short time as part of a competition for using the Dialog language.

It reminded me of both Hadean Lands in its setting and Heaven's Vault in its handling of translation.

You find an alien ship crashed on a moon next to your own crashed ship. In it, you discover a device that tells you the names of things in the alien language.

Using this, you can begin to decipher the alien words and piece the puzzle together of how to survive.

I played this without hints until the final puzzle, where I got stuck. My main issue that I had was (Spoiler - click to show)I thought the red sphere and blue sphere just needed to 'charge' and so you had to point them at the same thing for 3 seconds, then it worked. That got me the message I needed from the blue sphere but made the red one usually repeat itself, except when I pointed the red one at a whole sentence when it would do one word of that sentence at a time. So I thought then that it was just a thing that repeated three words of a sentence and would take shorter phrases and just repeat them to fill up those three slots.

Overall, it was satisfying and is one of the better language puzzles I've seen.

I had a couple very minor issues with implementation. One was that the 'shiny label' in the first ship room seemed important, but X LABEL didn't work. I think that occasionally other parts of objects weren't implemented by themselves, but I can't quite remember the rest. The important command (Spoiler - click to show)TOUCH WITH often resulted in the slightly confusing message (Spoiler - click to show)You can't put anything on __. The other thing was that clicking on a word brought up a prompt to rename it but didn't add cursor focus to that prompt, so you had to click manually. That might need tinkering with the javascript to fix but it isn't a serious impediment in any case.

Overall, it's impressive a game this complex was made in such a short time.