riyah

This language decipherment game comes from British developer Matthew Brown of Hexcells fame. In Epigraph you're presented with seven artifacts inscribed with texts in the undeciphered Nari language, and it's your job to play Champollion and be the first to translate them. Besides the drawings on the artifacts, the only information you have to go on is a letter from a friend that provides the names of a couple of kings and a city, as well as a few words in a language that is thought to be related to Nari. That's all you get, and it's all you need.



I bought this game because it's said to be extremely hard, and I wanted a good challenge. I agree that it's hard, but I think exactly how hard it is depends a lot on how much you know about languages. Nari is much less complex and more internally consistent than a real language (or even most conlangs) but many aspects of the grammar and writing system are clearly inspired by real languages. The more familiar you are with the ways languages can differ from each other, the easier this game will be. That said, I still spent six hours on it, so even going in with some helpful knowledge, it's not like I breezed through!

My main critique of the game is that the Nari writing has way too little visual contrast with the black background of the artifacts, and there's no way to change it in the settings. In my screenshot above I cranked the brightness and contrast way up, because otherwise you would not have been able to see anything. Being able to zoom in further would have helped too. I also found the conclusion of the game a bit anticlimactic, though I guess I'm not sure what I was expecting. It's really just a stand-alone puzzle, there's no story to speak of.

Epigraph is on Steam for $2.99 USD. If you're hungry for a challenging language puzzle, it's one to check out, and you can't beat the price!

In this middle book of the trilogy begun by The Fifth Season, the effects of the world-shattering volcanic eruption continue, driving people to hunker down in isolated communities to defend themselves against roving bands of desperate thieves. Our protagonist has managed to join a group living in an underground cavern with amenities powered by ancient magitech, but their comfortable haven makes them a juicy target for aggressors, putting a strain on the uneasy alliance between magic-users and mundanes in the community.

As is often the case with middle books, this one spends a lot of time setting up all the moving pieces of the conflicts that will inevitably come to a head in the final book. We learn much more about the ancient origins of this world's tectonic instability and its magic, about the motivations and allegiances of mysterious factions such as the immortal stone-eaters who can move through solid rock, about the reasons this apocalypse is happening now, and about what might have to happen to finally end the cycle of destruction. The protagonist's daughter Nassun is also introduced as a main character (in the first book she had gone missing) and we find out what's been going on with her all this time and how her loyalties and perceptions have diverged from her mother's in this time of struggle.

I really like the worldbuilding in this series, so the focus on that was very engaging for me, and I think Jemisin does a good job of mixing exposition and flashbacks with present rising action so that the pace never gets bogged down. I also found the complex interpersonal relationships fascinating, as the characters grapple with questions of what love is supposed to look like, and how far is acceptable to go in causing harm for a supposed greater good. I would not say that I like many of the characters in these books, but I do find it interesting to watch them try to navigate impossible situations and, in some cases, the dawning realization that what they've been taught to believe is right and necessary might actually be completely fucked up.

That said, there are some areas where I felt unsure whether the parts I thought were fucked up precisely aligned with the parts Jemisin wants us to think are fucked up.

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For example, there is a scene where the community is about to vote on whether to accept a deal to join with another group, except the other group doesn't want their orogenes (magic-users) so if the vote goes through they're leaving the orogenes high and dry. The protagonist decides it is wrong to use a democratic vote to determine whether a minority gets human rights, and I broadly agree with that even though I don't know that that's exactly what's happening in this scenario as presented, but I'm pretty much with her so far. The issue I have is that the protagonist stops the vote by threatening to kill everyone in the community, something she could do with a thought. This could be read as deliberate narrative irony—the protagonist recognizes injustice when it threatens her, but is oblivious to the ethical problems with her own actions. But is that actually what we're supposed to take away from this scene? Or is the idea that it's okay for the protagonist to get what she wants by holding people at magical gunpoint? The fact that the conflict eventually culminates in the protagonist leveling an entire city to eliminate it as a threat did not make this any clearer to me. As with the first book, I think events like this profoundly undermine the narrative's core position that orogenes are unjustly hated, since they are repeatedly shown to be just as dangerous as the people who hate them believe.

Also, when I reviewed the first book it was mentioned in the comments that the world of the series is presented as too harsh for disabled people to survive in, so I was more alert to that theme in reading the second book. It did come up a lot. I don't think Jemisin is trying to say that disabled people should be seen as a liability if they can't meet a certain standard of material contribution, but the characters in these books see it that way, and nobody argues against it unless there's a specific person they're trying to protect. To be clear, I don't think it's implausible in-universe that the characters would think/act this way, but since all the qualities of the universe and the characters were determined by the author, I do think it is fair to point out that she could have done things differently.

In any case, I'll certainly be reading the third book, so we'll see where things end up.