The Tempest of Baraqiel

(Based on the IFComp 2025 version)

Finally! A breakthrough that could turn this war around. Your side has captured an alien gravity cannon. Think about what we could learn about their technology, not to mention the fact that we can shoot one of their own spaceship-shattering guns at them!
Unfortunately, we can’t figure out the controls. And it’s not like this thing came with a manual in French, Korean, English, and -Ayiq-, right?

Enter you, brilliant xenolinguist. Decypher the button-labels on this cannon, ASAP.
(Something small but grating: although the entire game is written in second person, always adressing you as “You”, you, the player, sometimes have the power to choose what other characters are going to say. So suddenly, I’m not choosing what “You” is going to say, but what the colonel will say to me.)

The setting and premise of The Tempset of Baraqiel are interesting.
-A far-future intergalactic war lends itself to exploring future space-bound battle strategies, or the futuristic high-tech gizmos-that-go-boom and the massive destruction they wreak.
-Contact with an extraterrestrial highly intelligent civilization brings up questions about their culture, their social organisation, the way their specific biology shapes their intelligence and their interaction with the world.
-Exolinguistic research of a foreign artefact makes me think of an intergalactic Rosetta’s stone, or the (im)posibility to find common ground by delving to the bare foundations of communication, understanding an alien mind through the way its language is structured.

And The Tempest of Baraqiel touches upon all of those. It just never bores down beneath the surface to get at the heart of these hard questions. In its defense, it’s a war scenario taking place in the outreaches of both races’ territory, and except for shooting at each other and intercepting broadcasts, both sides don’t have the inclination nor the opportunity to get to know each other more closely (except for information about how to kill each other more effectively, I assume). There’s also a hint of [Top Secret] material that simply isn’t available to our research team.

The one thing that is undeniably, tangibly, 1+1=2, at our disposal is this version of a Rosetta’s stone, the cannon with its labelled buttons. We know what the buttons on a weapon should do, so that gives us a strong lead on how to interpret at least the minimal set of words or instructions inscribed on the controls of this weapon.

Alas! At least in my playthrough, the deduction of meaning through research of the script’s features (frequency of sounds/symbols, colour of syllables, onomatopeic structure, all very interesting) never led to a breakthrough. Instead, when the -Ayiq- spaceship was right overhead, I was given one random guess and then reduced to erratically smashing all buttons in the hopes of hitting “SHOOT”.

The story leading up to this finale felt similarly promising but ultimately unsatisfying.
-You’re the appointed leader, so gameplay allows some management of your relation with the members of your team, mostly coming down to choosing between a casual or a strict leadership style. On the other side of the hierarchical scale, you need to manage your relation with the bosses, prying loose as much information and privileges as you can while not appearing too disrespectful. Unfortunately , I kept feeling the characters as empty actors, there to say their lines and step back behind the curtains.
-Kel Shem, the protagonist, is poorly sketched, promising more substance at first than what is ultimately given. There’s mention of some angst about your militarily decorated (and dead) mother, and your choice to work far away from the army’s attention on your exolinguistics research as a possible consequence. Even so, while it feels like this might be a big deal later in the game, it’s skimmed over without bearing any weight later in the game.
-The character I did enjoy coming alive was Martov. With her, backstory and behaviour and style of conversation did come together to form a separate individual. (Dramatic details like being legless in a wheelchair(I’m leaving this in because I think it’s funny. I completely fused Martov with the legless character Billy Reston from House of Leaves, which 'm reading now.) limping around with a cane ready to knock some heads should the occasion present itself certainly helped…)
-Another character that I found very intruiging was the assistant drone XC_7A04. There’s a brief mention of its consciousness/intelligence being shared in a ship-wide datacloud with all the other AI-s present, raising questions of individuality vs hivemind, subservience of such a powerful intelligence to the humans who control them,…
When first meeting the drone, the protagonist even asks whether it has a name.

The drone pauses just long enough for you to notice the hesitation, and then continues on.

“My previous assignee was not of the view that service drones should have designations. My serial number is XC_7A04.”

And then… nothing. It just hangs there. Sure, we proceed to call it XC for short, but there is no more acknowledgement of the profound implications of this statement by the drone.
A balloon of narrative promise carried away soundlessly on the breeze.

I found the writing to be adequate, not more, but certainly nothing less either. The descriptions allowed me to clearly imagine the surroundings and other characters. I also enjoyed the tension in the scene with the Captain’s shuttle approaching the -Ayiq- spaceship while we were frantically trying to get the cannon working.
In general though, I couldn’t shake the disappointment over the many underdeveloped opportunities.

The fact that I’ve written at length about The Tempest of Baraqiel testifies that I truly feel there’s a great game, a great story, a great backstory in it. This version (or first installment?) just promises too many things that it doesn’t follow up on.