The Reliquary of Epiphanius

In this game, you play as a young adult whose archaeologist father has gone missing while searching for the titular reliquary. Concerned about him, the PC rides out to the countryside on their motorbike to find out where he went.

What follows is a puzzle game in an old-school vein. There’s a maze (which felt reasonably justified and well-integrated!) and a light source management mechanic and a decent number of puzzles to solve in which you open up passageways by manipulating the environment with objects that you pick up. The puzzles are largely not too complex, but it is definitely a game that rewards mapping and a certain amount of general note-taking. (An in-game diary is helpfully provided for the latter purpose, although I used a real pencil and paper.)

The game also has simple but evocative descriptions of wilderness and ruins and one rather endearing major NPC. Reliquary of Epiphanius’s most unusual puzzle essentially tests how much attention the player has been paying to all of these things, and I liked that quite a bit. Contributing to the atmosphere are small illustrations for each location and a lot of custom styling for things like inscriptions and handwritten notes, all of which added up to a strong aesthetic appeal.

While the ending reveals that (Spoiler - click to show)the reliquary has likely been destroyed due to careless development of the area, this didn’t make Epiphanius feel like a shaggy dog story. It helps, I think, that the PC has a separate goal to start with and that you accomplish this goal and more—you discover a lot of interesting things and solve an archaeological mystery, even if the solution isn’t what one would hope for. “Surprise, the thing you were told was your goal in this game isn’t achievable!” endings also often feel kind of smug and condescending to me, and this one didn’t, perhaps because it seemed like it had a point to make other than “adventure games and/or certain genres of fiction aren’t very realistic.” The researcher’s joy of discovery is here undercut by the actions of greedy developers and a country that hasn’t always been very careful with its archaeological bounty.

Implementation was a little fiddlier than I tend to prefer (if you can intercept me trying to take action on an item to tell me I need to pick it up first, you can make me try taking it automatically) and I’m not sure the light source management added real, interesting challenge as opposed to busywork (which is how I tend to feel about all light source management mechanics, to be fair). But other than that, this was a very solid traditional puzzle game with some appealingly distinctive aspects, and I hope to see more from this author in the future.