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.