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Review
The Tempest of Baraqiel is a game in which the protagonist, military linguist Kel Shem, must decipher the settings on an advanced alien weapon so that humans can figure out how to operate the weapon and make a show of being able to hold their own against this superior foe.
Kel is also dealing with hostile superior officers, a lack of information they need to do their job, and the legacy of a famous mother that they’re struggling to live up to, and before you get to the translation stuff, you have to go through quite a lot of scenes of them trying to navigate interpersonal interactions around these things. Although the POV is exclusively Kel’s and they are unquestionably the main character, the player is often expected to select dialogue options for both Kel and their hostile superiors or skeptical team members, a design choice that I found somewhat odd and disorienting. I’m not sure what effect it was intended to have; for me it made it harder to fully identify with Kel and feel the pressure and frustration of navigating the situation they were in, and felt a little bit like I was playing both sides of a two-player game.
The translation sequence was absolutely the most compelling part of the game, and the part where I most felt like I knew what my goal was and what effect my choices were having. Even if you sometimes choose options for other members of the team in this section, at least you’re playing as members of a team with a unified purpose, not two people who are supposed to be clashing. Unfortunately I’m enough of a linguistics nerd to be bothered by how incredibly tidy and logical the language was—more of a code designed for puzzles than an actual language—and by the technobabble by which the characters sometimes reach realizations. I do understand that an accurate simulation of the process of deciphering an unknown language would take several years for the player to complete and be impossible to beat if you didn’t have a team of academics in relevant fields helping you out; I like to think I cut translation games some slack here. (I do love Heaven’s Vault!) But (Spoiler - click to show)“every word is exactly four phonemes and each position corresponds to a color and each phoneme corresponds to a number” is fully into “this is something I would expect to see in a puzzle hunt rather than while reading about real languages” territory. Even for aliens it seems like a bit of a stretch.
The game is definitely doing some intriguing things and some people seem to have gotten a lot more out of it than I did. I will confess to not being in the most charitable mood while playing most of the game, because I tried to play it in two sessions but, due to the faulty save function, ended up having to replay the first 1/3 and then rush to play the rest of the game in one sitting. But in the end I think it was not really for me.
Accessibility note: Due to the lack of light mode I had to use Stylebot to be able to play this game, so it was ultimately no more of a problem than a well-designed dark mode would have been, but I have to say the option buttons making the text darker and the background lighter was not a good choice. Once again I feel obligated to beat the drum of “please use a contrast checker!” (Some things pass that shouldn’t, so it’s not a guarantee you will not have problems, but it is the bare minimum.)
