Playing A Game Sethian PC

Sethian has a really fascinating premise and a very impressive design, but wastes itself on an incomplete plot and a disappointing narrative.

The game's primary interface is the keyboard for an alien computer, and you have to talk to the computer to figure out what's going on. It sits about halfway between puzzle game and a visual novel -- slightly evocative of games like TIS-100, in learning how to use the alien language; and of games like Analogue: A Hate Story, in solving a mystery through dialog interaction.

This ambitious combination of ideas requires an intricate linguistic design, and much to its credit, Sethian actually pulls it off. Its invented language has both a suitable dictionary, with quirks that lend to (and hint at) the backstory of the Sethian people; as well as a grammatical structure that, while complete, is foreign enough to steep all of your interactions in uncertainty.

Another critical part of Sethian's design is comfortably introducing players to the language -- and this, too, is done surprisingly well. An in-game journal holds your hand at the start, gradually introducing new grammatical concepts as it helps you walk through the story. Later on, its instructions get more ambiguous, forcing you to determine on your own how to translate thoughts into alienese.

And then it just ... kind of stops.

Sethian has two endings, "bad" and "good." The bad ending essentially concludes the journal's story, and it only took me about an hour and a half to get there. It felt abrupt, like I never got far enough to properly master the language; and while the ending was somewhat interesting in terms of explaining the plot, I felt like it dulled too much of the setting's intrigue.

The good ending, contrarily, requires more outside-the-box thinking. To wit: I looked up online how to start it, plus a couple steps after that. This was bothersome to me in the same way as "classic" adventure games with nonsensically arbitrary solutions. (And in the end, it didn't expand much on the bad ending's narrative, either.)

Sethian really feels to me like it could have been incredible, if it had built a more complicated backstory and then written more gameplay to explore it. As it is, it's practically a tech demo.

Better than: Pony Island, Dear Esther
Not as good as: TIS-100, Analogue: A Hate Story
I will still be interested: If this is sequelized.

Rating: Meh