The Tempest of Baraqiel

I really liked this one... up until the ending. I enjoyed inhabiting the main character and exploring the unique situation they (she?) found themself in, pulled from academia into the military to work on a top-secret translation assignment, with the shadow of their deceased war-hero mother constantly looming over them, influencing everyone's perceptions and expectations. But ultimately, the payoff was disappointing. In my first playthrough, after making basically zero translation progress, the outcome of the climactic moment came down to a random guess--which I got wrong, to disastrous consequences.

Fortunately I had enabled the "back" button and could easily try different choices until I got a "good" ending, but even this one felt very abrupt and perfunctory and was unsatisfying. Both endings referenced a character who I hadn't heard of before, leaving me feeling like I had missed something important. But with the "save" function broken, replaying over and over until I discovered the key path(s) felt like more trouble than it was worth (until today, when I opened the JS file and poked around a bit to get some guidance. But obviously, having to resort to that is not ideal!). This feels like a game where you need to see multiple paths to get the full picture, but it fights against itself by not making it easy to do so.

This was great. I like sci fi, languages, trying to understand aliens, etc. It reminded me of works like the movie Arrival or the book The Mote in God's Eye, both of which I like.

You play as an exolinguist, an expert in alien languages, assigned to a new military mission where you discover you have been assigned an impossible task: decode an alien language that has remained untranslated for over a hundred years in order to help the military use a new weapon.

You're assigned a team of individuals with differing talents and have to interface with multiple commanding officers and a robot companion.

One major feature of the game that I didn't pay attention to (I'll have to replay) is that the musical soundtrack changes dynamically as you play, which I thought was really neat. There are some 3d animations as well, but I found myself enjoying my imagination more more often.

I thought the writing was solid, especially dialogue and interactions with other characters. My only real grip is that I felt that the ending came at a time where there was still narrative momentum; it didn't feel like the right time (to me) for the game to end, which might be due to having multiple endings in the game (making it harder to pace it).

But yeah, this is one of the games that reminds me why I like interactive fiction in general, it's just fun to read, interaction felt meaningful, and it intersects with a lot of my niche interests.