anpa ma

This game is written in Toki Pona, a minimalistic conlang (artificial language) designed to have only around 100 words. The whole dictionary can fit on one page, so it's possible to (slowly) play this game without any prior knowledge.

I first got an idea of how to play by reading a Let's Play on the intfiction forums. After I tried playing a bit, I found that you can TRANSLATE any bolded word you see, which translates the object, its description, and context. With that as a base, I found myself slowly able to translate lines one at a time.

However, there are some big text dumps where TRANSLATE doesn't work. For those, I searched online for a Toki Pona translator and only found LLMs that do it. I decided to use Copilot to translate big chunks. I vary in my feelings on AI usage, focusing mainly on whether the AI produces good work, is depriving others of work, and on resource usage. AI is pretty good at translation, there were no other ways to translate Toki Pona except by hand, so I was only concerned about resource usage, so tried to limit my use to very large pages where I was stuck. I also assumed the author would oppose AI usage and want people to pick up the language, so I did my best. It was fun to realize that some words were just english or romance languages adapted to the alphabet (like 'group' becoming 'kulupu').

Once I was done, I realized that while the translation was done in a cool way and the game by itself is fun (and has cool CSS), they don't mesh well. I play a ton of foreign language IF, and I've found that such games are easiest for foreigners when:
-Vocab is kept simple and most commands are given on the postcard or given in the text (I found it hard to figure out how to TAKE things in the game, as it's missing from the IF command postcard and only found in text. You have to KAMA JO something or JO something. Furthermore, you MUST put an E before the object of any verb. So you have to both somehow figure out you need to type JO and to put E before something. Also, the vocab is quite complex given the simple language, as we have mechanical devices and bizarre creatures).
-All connections and points of interest in the world model are clearly labelled (In this game, there is an important action and an important exit not mentioned in the text. The exit is hinted at in a very long text dump, but the action of (Spoiler - click to show)looking under the bed is one I only tried because it was a verb on the postcard).
-Talking is handled by menu, choices, or simple TALK TO (in this game, you can ask about different topics).
-Actions like unlocking and taking and dropping are handled implicitly.) (In this game, you have a two (!) item inventory limit!)

The points above are not 'good game vs bad game', just 'games that are personally easier for me to play as a non-native speaker' vs 'harder for me'.

The story is pretty neat. To help any future players, here's a long explanation of what I encountered as I played (essentially complete spoilers):

(Spoiler - click to show)I woke up in a house and found a letter describing my affection for a dark-haired person named Penelopi. Penelopi went to the underworld. I wanted to follow. I looked under the bed and found a coin. I went outside and went to a forest. I saw plants and a bug that I remember Penelope liking. On a later playthrough, I saw a tree and had a memory of her being kind to a lizard while I flirted with her, and she suggested climbing the tree. Up in the tree I found a mechanical egg.

Later, I went (Spoiler - click to show)to a town where I went to a shop. On my first playthrough, I had no money, so I went out and talked to a guard at the mouth of a cave to the underworld. The guard wouldn't let me in and also had a copy of Counterfeit Monkey in a bag. They wanted to learn english to play it. I went and found the coin under the bed and spent it to buy an english dictionary. I gave it to the guard. He then let me into the underworld after warning that it was dangerous.

Once inside, (Spoiler - click to show)I fell down a broken floor and saw some cool CSS. I took a yellow flower. I then fell more and found Penelopi turned into a lizard monster. She saw the flower and like it so she ate me. I then replayed, looking at the game textdump uses glulx-strings and saw that there was a mechanical egg (that apparently has a neat distraction tool inside). I sold the egg and bought the ring and took the letter. This time I showed Penelope the letter and the ring, and she decided she liked me and that I could stay.

Overall, the frustrations with the difficult content in a conlang game made me want to rate 3/5, but making a game in a conlang feels like a 5/5 thing, so I'm giving 4/5.

Compared to the Gostak, this game has hard basic structure (remembering stuff like li and la and e was hard) but easy vocab ('jan wawa' isn't too hard to understand after a while), while the Gostak has easy basic structure (just English) with almost impossible vocab. Since the basic grammar structure is most of reading, I found the Gostak easier to read in a 'flow state' but this game easier to understand the overall narrative.