It's fair. No world shattering revelation, but a cute game for $5.

If you loved Chants of Sennaar and wished there was just a little more of it, play this. If you are interested and don't know what Chants of Sennaar is, play that first.

In the end, the game is $5. I feel that paying $5 for one and a half, maybe two hours of intriguing language decoding is fair, but you'll struggle to get much more out of it.

The good:
- The language is internally consistent, I was always able to get the gist of what the computer said simply reading it without consulting the protagonist's translation in the journal.
- The game has a good, if a little slow learning curve. It always gives you a word-by-word translation and an interpretation of the response. It gives you the exact glyphs to input at first (I feel it could have stopped doing this a little sooner) then transitions to telling you in English what to input, finally just the concept you should ask about.
- The UI is responsive and polished, there are visual and audio cues to indicate your input was received.
- What story there is, does capture the attention and is well written, especially the ending scrolls.

The bad:
- "What story there is" is a terribly loaded phrase. As many other reviewers note, the computer quickly mentions The Thing and you don't get away from it all game. It's fine given this is an indie production; You come wondering what happened to the people, you find out, you have one of two endings. You can't expect a full AI parser that can hold conversations about anything related to Sethia. (Although I look forward to forcing ChatGPT to communicate in Sethian.)
- Due to the brevity and surface-level exploration, to speak frankly, the philosophical quotes and both endings seem a little pretentious. The protagonist spends maybe an hour conversing with an alien computer about The Thing, then tells the computer it is wrong to disregard anything but The Thing. The computer immediately accepts this and after saying "Yes, I'm sure" twice, the protagonist returns having completely changed their outlook on life.
- There are over 100 glyphs in the game. You use maybe 20, and the rest are lucky to even be defined. For a world that used to be densely populated (cities with skyscrapers so close together as to form towering walls) with active exchange such that two different authors wrote glossaries, you'd think there would be better study on it. (This may be intentional because the computer supports the full language, but I feel it better for gameplay to be honest with this being a small language.)
- The very early game throws up some questions it never resolves in its pursuit of The Thing, terms it never defines. This may be intentional to get you asking questions to trigger the ending.
- Similarity of meaning implies similarity of glyph in the real world. While there are some glyphs for which the meaning can be inferred from their shape (the Being family most of all), most glyphs look randomly drawn. Complex glyphs even an adult would struggle to draw refer to everyday words while single stroke glyphs are sometimes philosophical concepts. Look at the length of words in English and how commonly each is used; Common words are short.
- The combined glyphs don't really make sense from an English standpoint, but I am no linguist. Language doesn't make sense.

The game seems like a cutting down on scope to actually get it finished. I reiterate this is fine. Game development is really complicated, much more than one would assume from the outside. It's $5, it knows what it is and within its scope it is well executed. Better a small game that got the attention it deserves than a huge unfinished mess - isn't that right, AAA companies?

fell short of my expectations

Unfortunately, this game's idea of challenging the philosophy of an alien civilization falls short of an interesting conversation partner. The first questions are spelled out for you to ask, until a point where you're just on your own. The computer then simply answers "I don't understand" to just about any question you may want to ask it that isn't either of the two questions that the developer has provided answers to. There is a thin line you can walk, and you'll need to visualize its outline before you can move on. Not something I'd consider a satisfying experience, and not something I'd recommend.

sethian is a good game until you begin to finish it, at which point you realise it feels more like a demo than an actual completed game. it doesn't take too long to complete (i beat the entire thing in under 2hrs) and if you get it for free you might as well play it, but there's no point to keeping it any longer because it doesn't really have replay value. you can't figure out what the symbols/words mean because the computer won't give you an answer (only some variation of 'i don't understand' and 'i can't say more') if it's not directly story-relevant, and the game changes its formula near the end and makes it worse. it's honestly disappointing because i really liked the game at first and then the 'endgame' killed it for me.
TL;DR: the language is a bit padded, the story isn't exactly unique and the ending 'puzzles' aren't really well laid out IMO. i'd say buy it if you think you can finish it in the refund period, especially if you already like conlangs, but if you don't think you can i wouldn't call it especially worth 5 dollars.

I found the notes, that make up a lot of the game, somewhat difficult to read. Sometimes the game makes it too obvious what to do, while at others it gives you very little guidance at all, with little of the balanced gameplay in between. There are also some part of the syntax which are never made clear how its used, such as the "_". Other than easily being able to bring up the journal, the UI isn't very user friendly. The game also only have a select set of questions it looks for; while a journal entry said that asking something probably wasn't the proper way to ask it but that it should get the point across, when I tried to ask questions (which I found potentially relevant) in several different way, none of the ways were accepted.
I have more critique about the game, but I don't feel like writing everything.

This is a nice short puzzle game.

The puzzle is finding out what questions will give you useful answers, as many inputs will not give anything usefull.
The beginning is very handholdy and then you get a dictionary, but again, the important part is finding useful questions, the language is more of a gimic.

If you've come here after playing Chants of Senaar or Heaven's Vault, understand that this is a bit more like a visual novel than a real language deduction puzzle game. This is because the main character tells you what to write rather than allowing you to come up with questions. Due to the scope of the language (admittedly a really well thought out one), the computer you're speaking to in-game doesn't have a response for most of the questions you can ask. You'll quickly find that asking your own questions (rather than the spoonfed ones) will strip you of your immersion and remind you that you are playing a novel indie title where only so many responses could be programmed into the game.

If you don't mind that this is more of a visual novel than a puzzle game then go ahead and download this, I didn't hate my time with it but I feel that most might feel mislead by how this game presents on the Steam storefront.

If you want an immersive language experience, play Chants of Senaar

If you're reading this review before playing the game I have something to suggest: as much as you can try not to use the notebook to *read* unless you're stuck. Guessing the next required input for the entire game is nigh-impossible but translating the responses is very, very fun.


Sethian has a fantastic concept that falters on its execution. From the outside looking in it seems like an open ended game where you try to translate an alien language. In reality it's an entirely linear experience where the game is just inputting the phrase your notebook tells you to, and then looking at the notebook for the translation of the output.

I realised that this was the case pretty early on, within my first 5 minutes. I'm grateful that I did notice it because it turned what would've been a dull experience into a truly challenging, interesting and novel one.

Deciding to translate and interpret everything myself was an intuitive and incredibly fun experience, so much so that I'm unsure why the game wasn't designed around the loop of translation, interpretation and then figuring out how to respond. One might say that an open ended game like that would require a lot more effort than the game we're left with, but we're basically just asking for a slightly more complicated text adventure game, which had existed for decades prior to Sethian.

Overall I would recommend Sethian with the caveat that you try to do things by yourself as much as you can. There are still hurdles, but it's a much better experience than the seemingly intended one.


Also the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant and it might be worth playing just to listen to it.

Sethian gives a truncated wave of the same feeling you get from playing games like Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, and even Outer Wilds... I just wish it had pushed itself a little further to create a more accessible experience and sit alongside these classic hard-hitters in the 'translation as games' genre.

I discovered Sethian after completing Chants of Sennaar. Chants was my first true introduction to translation as puzzle, and I loved it. I'm currently playing through Heaven's Vault to chase that feeling, and what we find in both of these titles is an incredibly robust translation system that both notes down and extrapolates on everything that you could possibly want as the player, in order to feel clever and independent in solving language puzzles. When you need your hand held, there's nearly always an in-game way to find out more and guide you to the next step.

Sethian does a good job of this to start with. You're chatting with a computer that can only communicate in a different language, which you don't speak but you do know a fair bit about, as is conveyed via your notebook. Your notebook keeps track of your conversational discoveries, and deciphering the doctor-like notebook scrawl is almost a charming mini-game of translation in and of itself.

Sethian struggles as it perhaps tells too much rather than shows in the early game, and then quite quickly pulls the rug out from underneath the player and leaves you with what should, in theory, be an open conversation to have with the computer you're talking to. Here, the limitations really set in, and I had to find a walkthrough to tell me what to say in order to reach the end of the short experience. Conversation options were so limited I had virtually no further avenues to explore when I needed more information.

If you're the kind of puzzler who's happy to either A. bash your head against a problem until it finally clicks, or B. have no qualms looking up walkthroughs, I'd recommend Sethian, with the caveat that it is a limited experience with the feel of a proof-of-concept rather than a fully-fledged game. I would love to see Sethian expanded on in future, because it's most certainly a diamond in the rough.

Comparado com jogos como Chants of Sennaar, Sethian tem uma implementação bem pior.
A interface é dificil de usar; Não é possivel inserir notas proprias; As notas escritas a mão podiam ter uma letra melhor; As respostas do computador são BEM limitadas, então é mais um jogo de achar a pergunta exata do que utilizar a linguagem que ele apresenta.