The Reliquary of Epiphanius

I went to Italy for my honeymoon, and when my wife and I were reviewing our photos after the trip, we realized that other than posed pictures where I was smiling into the camera on command, I only ever had two expressions in the candid ones: either I’d be looking down at the guidebook (shoutout to the Blue Guides, whose writeups boast incredibly detailed art-historical analyses, religious and cultural context, and the kind of passive-aggressive condescension that means you understand that if they call something “popular”, it’s meant as a withering insult), or I’d be squinting up at an inscription in Latin and trying to puzzle out its meaning based only on my increasingly-vague memory of two years of middle-school classes in the language and whatever I managed to pick up by osmosis from studying law.

So when I tell you that The Reliquary of Epiphanius is a parser game where you squint at Latin inscriptions and try to puzzle them out, and where you’re also subjected to overly-detailed lectures about which saints and which local patrons are depicted in a series of friezes, what I am saying is that I was in heaven. Oh, there’s other fun stuff about this mystery – most notably, it’s implemented in Vorple and has a really cool map of the Italian village where your dad has gone missing while searching for a lost ecclesiastical treasure. And it’s got a couple of rough spots which meant I had to start over after getting into an unwinnable state right at the end of the game. But the authentic, detail-oriented way the core premise is realized is just so entirely my jam that none of the bells and whistles or occasional implementation stumble really mattered to how much I enjoyed it.

When I say it’s detail-oriented, I don’t meant that it’s plodding; Reliquary is actually pretty zippy, with puzzles that generally aren’t too challenging and not much time spent between important plot points. And it’s not that there’s overdetailed rococo scenery or anything; it’s just that the relatively-standard parser structure is fleshed out with just the right level of research and verisimilitude. This is the kind of game where if you examine the random photos in city hall, you’ll learn about how the local dam was constructed, down to the year when it was completed, and where a big payoff is learning that you might have discovered Italy’s first depiction of Mary’s Assumption. Like, I’m a pretty big nerd about this kind of stuff, but I had no idea that the Saracens launched raids on Italy’s Adriatic coast in the 11th century until I learned about it in the game. And yeah, as you’re exploring the various churches and historical sites that make up the game’s setting, you come across a bunch of Latin, none of which is automatically translated so far as I recall. Obviously in this day and age a quick google is all you need to figure things out (and the game was originally released in Italian, where the assumption that the audience would be able to get the drift without too much trouble is probably on firmer ground) – plus these are usually just adding a bit of context or at most a helpful but superfluous clue – but still, I respect a game that rewards a player who knows stuff or makes an effort to learn, rather than just having the player character do all the work.

Speaking of the fact that this is a game translated into English, I felt like this added a unique quality to the prose, too. As you explore the first few locations in the village, you’re told that the “pellitory of the wall grows spontaneously in the cracks between the stones,” which is a syntax that feels unfamiliar to English, and also matter-of-factly drops the technical name of a weed that would typically just be called a weed. True, there are places where the translation feels overly polished into blandness – we’re told of a barmaid that “her lifeless eyes and weary expression give her an air of boredom and age her beyond her years,” which is prose only an LLM could love – but for the most part the writing is a highlight.

The puzzles are pretty good too – there isn’t anything notably challenging, but they’re satisfying to solve, and reward you for paying attention to all the things you learn. They also feel organic: it’s reasonable to need to get oriented to the landscape before you can start wandering around looking for the ruins of a church, for example. There are one or two that may not hold if up if you think too hard about the plausibility of various millennium-old mechanisms still functioning in contemporary times, but that’s part of the suspension of disbelief the genre requires. As for the various NPCs, they aren’t especially helpful or deeply implemented, but there’s sufficient narrative justification for this so I didn’t mind.

Reliquary does have some old-school elements: most notably, its tracking of time and insistence that one move equals one minute, combined with the battery-powered (though at least rechargeable) flashlight, got me in trouble in my first playthrough, since my light source ran out just as a got to a hidden location that I couldn’t leave until I solved a puzzle that I couldn’t see well enough to even begin to address. But I was having so much fun I didn’t mind retracing my steps. Similarly, I ran into a couple of small syntax issues, one of which sent me to the hints before realizing I had the puzzle solved (in a particular place, UNLOCK DOOR tells you that you can’t see any such thing, which is odd because UNLOCK MARBLE DOOR allows you to proceed).

But as I said above, I can’t bring myself to care about any of that – I can’t think of many other games that satisfy the fantasy of uncovering lost secrets by knowing a lot about religious art and Latin as Reliquary does. The fact that when you reach the ending, it actually has something to say about Italian society’s relationship to its past is just gilding the lily; for a particular kind of traveler, this game is about as good as virtual tourism gets.