Extra difficulty mode

[Hammaster]

Loved the demo. I was wondering if you could add an optional extra difficulty mode to the finished game where you don't get to confirm the meanings of words in the journal? I really like the idea of having to rely only on your own notes without being 100% certain about anything.

[Rundisc]

Hello,

Be warned that the demo you tried corresponds to the very beginning of the game, and consists more or less of an easy and quite directed tutorial. Very quickly, you will notice that progressing in the game without the help of the Journal validations becomes much more difficult...

Nevertheless, even if we do not recommend playing this way, as it would make the game nearly impossible to finish, you can still try: all you have to do is not to validate any of the pages of the diary (except the first one, which is the only mandatory one). Good luck for that! :)

[junkmail]

I agree - I missed that we didn't get ambiguity from the words. I had like four different words for certain things and it was unfortunate that that ambiguity and guesswork got crushed down into a single canonical interpretation.

Is this "person" or "unfortunate person?" Is this "Warrior" or "Enemy"? Is this "Pilgrim" or "Priest" or "Pious Person?" Is this "Sun" or "Divinity" or "God"? I was debating the validity of each interpretation as I went through the murals and it was a bit disappointing that exactly one of those words got to be correct each time. It's also a little disappointing that once you had all the words for a sentence, you got the correct translated grammar every time.

I suspect when I play this I will also opt to not use the journal confirmations.

[NoNoNO]

I agree and think maybe the devs are underestimating just how capable those who are big fans of language, deciphering and puzzles are. Maybe they have play testers with a good linguistics background that have told them otherwise though.

I probably will also avoid the confirmations as much as possible, and would be relieved if the journal was able to be hidden by an option or something so that the images didn't give away anything either. I didn't find myself needing them in the demo and I found seeing them took away some of the satisfaction of understanding without aids.

I really like being able to assign terms to each glyph myself though. That's all I would need.

[Benjamin LEDRAPPIER]

I didn't play the demo but i played the game in a indi festival and i had validate first word who was not the same as another save so synonyme were working so i don't get your probleme with validation

[Shadowmech]

Originally posted by junkmail:

I had like four different words for certain things

Same. In fact, I wish the definition fields allowed more characters. A couple times I had to trim down my definitions because all the possibilities I thought of wouldn't fit.

[Greg Power]

Originally posted by NoNoNO:

I probaas able to be hidden by an option or something so that the images didn't give away anything either. I didn't find myself needing them in the demo and I found seeing them took away some of the satisfaction of understanding without aids.

I really like being able to assign terms to each glyph myself thougbly will also avoid the confirmations as much as possible, and would be relieved if the journal wh. That's all I would need.

Same thoughts. Though I probably had a harder time, the confirmations made it ridiculously easy. Even just seeing the illustrations screen made things too obvious.

When I saw this game, I was expecting less hand-holding because I thought it was going to be more about deciphering languages. I wish there was a different mode or just an option to opt out of the illustrations/confirmations, and they could present a warning if that's not the intended experience.

If the demo is representative of the whole game, there's already tons of context clues to use as a hint for what each of the glyphs mean.

[Rundisc]

Again, the demo corresponds to the very beginning of the game, and thus to a kind of long tutorial. In essence, the first 30 minutes of any game are rarely designed to be that difficult.

I invite you to try the full game when it's available in order to have a better idea of its difficulty, as well as of the interest/necessity of the validation.

[NoNoNO]

I definitely still have the game on my radar and will give it a try. It's just hard to judge how different the complete game will be without playing it, and with a puzzle like game like this once you have the solution you can't go back to a harder difficulty to try again.

[Greenman the Vile]

Just managed to take a peek at the demo, and have to agree: the ambiguity makes it so much better! Definitely doing my first run as blind as I can (is there a way to not even pull out the hinty book?).
This is the kind of game where I would absolutely want to mess up as badly as possible, misunderstand something in the worst way, and spend hours trying to figure out my mistakes. Please let me play this way!

[花园骑士]

Came from some La-Mulana fan’s recommendation and this is very similar to how you feel about difficulty in the first area of that game, Gate of Guidance. Needless to say the difficulty ramps up exponentially, especially if you don’t take notes and check up everything you have frequently in that game, which is why I appreciate this game having a system that acts as “confirmation guy” for some severe misunderstandings that could occur later.
Now onto the game itself. I often come up with 2-4 meanings for each letter/symbol (haha here it comes) and would be able to eliminate half of them during subsequent encounters with them. However there are still cases where I get it completely wrong (I thought the shapehead people were mortal rulers of a kingdom before notebook check) and other times they weren’t presented very clearly with character actions only so I am glad that the game gives me an opportunity (not forced if you don’t do it and not easily cheesed if you don’t spam it) to validate them before I make further speculations based on wrong assumptions (which would get very annoying if I were forced to backtrack to every single time they appeared)

[Myriad Destiny]

My biggest head-scratcher in the design intent so far in the demo is that "search" and "find" are 2 different words?

I would definitely have expected "find" to be treated as "search" + some kind of perfective suffix

Overall, I like the picture-based validation, as long as there's enough usage of a glyph that I've already basically figured it out on my own already so it's just checking.

[Siris]

After completely the game without validating as much as I could, I think it's entirely possible, I only validated things when I was too lazy to backtrack and check if I was right. There was multiple times I realized I misunderstood a word, but that was fixed through some thinking and revisiting some previous conversations. I think a hard mode would be a great addition (maybe keep the illustrations but make it so the player can't put anything there?) Either way I really enjoyed the extra difficulty I gave myself once I realized how easy the game was if you validate everything after the first level.

[Echoes of the Silk: Songpour]

Completely agree; what's not great is how the game does not support the player figuring out the game without needing to lock in the meaning of glyphs. It's not just the very beginning, where you have to lock 'open', 'close' and 'door', near the end at the 5th level, the game automatically locks in the meaning of certain glyphs for you. Whereas in the rest of the game, it was very rewarding trying to piece it together rather than the game giving it away through the illustrations or changing the words to fit the context for you. I really do wish they made that last part of the game not do the figuring out for you when that never happens in the rest of the game at all.

[Siris]

Yes! The 5th level was kind of unrewarding to me personally as well because it felt like I never really figured out the language like I did the others. There was barely any puzzle work or hints to let the player figure out that language, it was just given to you which I felt kind of sad about.

[Echoes of the Silk: Songpour]

Originally posted by Siris:

Yes! The 5th level was kind of unrewarding to me personally as well because it felt like I never really figured out the language like I did the others. There was barely any puzzle work or hints to let the player figure out that language, it was just given to you which I felt kind of sad about.

It's a shame because it can be easily rectified by having the computer screen continuing to display the illustrations and the glyphs you combined together, so that you can enter it in the book yourself if you want to. The yellow computers that also automatically enter glyphs in the book for you as well are not as big of a deal because you still figure out how they align on your own, so it's just QoL at that point. That said, it's definitely not as cool as entering it yourself, even if it's already obvious which glyphs are the equivalent of others.