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Review
This is the second toki pona game I've played. Toki pona is a conlang (constructed language) based on the idea of using as few words as possible, with around 100 or so canonical words and some extra ones people use (at least two of which make their way into this game, 'monsuta' for scary and a word for medicine I don't recall). There is a hieroglyph version of the language, which this game uses.
I found that easier to understand than the alphabet version, since the pictures give a kind of meaning and you can say things mentally like 'I see at inside cloth hole' and translate like that.
The last IFComp had a game by Daniel Stelzer that tries to teach you Sumerian through games, and carefully guides you through it, helping you learn as you go. Similarly, the game Suveh Nux teaches you a magical language, carefully, one word at a time.
Both toki pona games I've played (including this one) don't do that, they just dump it at you. Why? Is it just something they wanted to make, not caring what others experience? Is it due to a kind of overconfidence in how easy the language is? Or maybe it actually is easy. I got more comfortable with it by the end. Some parts of it were quite moving/emotional, like 'sound mouth him (is) broken little'.
I have thoughts on Toki Pona in general (that to use it for general purposes would require standardizing word combinations which would just make it a regular language without anything special) but I thought this game worked well. I don't know what the light line was. I generally had a page full of hieroglyphs and translations open on one side and the game on the other, and opened a google Gemini tab and said 'translate this' on each page after I did my best. That helped me with some connections like 'air' and 'spirit' being the same (which must be based on things like Greek 'pneuma').
