The Archives of Trevosa
"I am Ludir, oloth-til of Oreleth-cyno-taayen of Trevosa. If this signal has reached you, the situation is dire. The dreadful nyscet lies in wait to destroy, and theevei look to the solaam for an omen: who is the rightful heir?"
Search through the hidden archives of Trevosa, translate their cultural terms, and uncover the relationships within a complex royal family tree. Can you untangle all seven generations? A challenging narrative deduction game inspired by The Roottrees Are Dead.
How to Play
- Your goal is to identify the name and title for each of the 30 family members.
- On the right, read the documents you've discovered and search for clues.
- Search Trevosan words or family members' names to find the first three documents mentioning them.
- Click a word to search for it.
- Or go to the Search tab and type in your search.
- Based on what you learn, set each person's name and title in the tree. Once three people are correct, they'll lock in.
Tips
- Each document shows how many words you haven't searched yet it contains as a green number. Use this if you're not sure where to search next.
- Click on the right side of a scroll to set a bookmark color - this is just for notetaking. Use it for documents you want to revisit, etc.
- Use the notes tab or your own notes!
- Starting tip: Some people in the tree have an additional title. Try searching for those as a starting point.
Known issues
- ⚠️ Progress is not saved when leaving the browser window.
- We're missing a better notification of family members locking in.
Credits
Created in 72 hours for Ludum Dare 59.
Comments
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Can you add a way to replace words you've translated?
love these document mystery games and this one is awesome!
Great game!
Lol now at 27/30 due to a lucky guess on The Seer, not sure how The Gate Opener gets that title, but just most annoying that I'm missing the Yoret and Tamoth heirs' names, with ~15 green dots to have to check to find just 3 new things for the Archive. heh
And got it with a lucky where the Letter to Talai is the third thing shown. And that letter was apparently the only thing with their names. ROFL
For The Gate Opener (rot13): gur ragel lbh arrq vf "Gur Bcravat" (nsnvx bayl sbhaq ol frnepuvat "yrv"? juvpu nqzvggrqyl vf n ovg bofpher, ohg frnepuvat sbe nyy gur ahzoref nsgre trggvat "Ehyrf bs yvivat va Geribfn" vfa'g *gbb* zhpu bs n fgergpu), juvpu jura pbzovarq jvgu trareny pbagrkg nobhg gur snanng jne vaqvpngrf gung bar bs Pnyqbfn'f cneragf ghearq genvgbe ol bcravat gur tngr fb gung fur pbhyq orpbzr gur arj eblny pbafbeg jvgu Abyirgu'f ervta. V guvax gur bayl jnl gb gryy juvpu bar vg jnf vf ol cebprff bs ryvzvangvba bapr lbh unir Gnny nffvtarq gb n qvssrerag gvgyr (vzcyvrq va gur ragel nobhg ure qrngu), gubhtu
Got 6/30 currently, good music! Not too loud, very thinky plinky.
Would like names and titles to be removed from the options once they're locked in, but 30 isn't too hard to navigate!
And now at 18/30.
Typo: Basheel's Journal: lives a live > lives a life
Great game! I completed it but there was one word I couldn't quite work out the meaning of:
[Spoilers]
sevel/sevol (and presumably sevail) - at various points I thought it meant sibling, uncle/aunt or just relative, but I don't think any of those fit all the mentions.
Yep, that’s one we didn’t get to expand on as much as we wanted.
Spoiler
Sevel means older sibling relative to the speaker, leeveth is younger sibling. We thought that would be an interesting distinction, but then didn't get to work it in as much as we intended.Game good
Soooo... who was the right heir then? I was expecting the game to open a dialog to choose between them but it didn't happen, so my suspicion remains unverified. :)
so all three of them are the heirs, the document about succession, plus the accord state that the three of them effectively rule jointly with slightly different roles, and that whoever's the youngest (Ludir I think) will be the 'king' and take someone as his bride that isn't mentioned. Unless I'm wrong?
I will confess that we ran out of time to clarify what we had in mind here and to set up a test at the end. I’m not going to say anything more, because I want it to be discoverable if we do a post-jam version with a more built-out ending!
really enjoyed this, it was fun trying to piece the 'lore' together on this one :D
Love this game. I wish that when the game is over, the Trevosan words were translated to English so I could have a clearer picture of what’s happening.
Was so so happy to see a new jamwitch game in my inbox this morning. Excited to play!
Just finished and just as I thought, was a lot of fun! One question, I unlocked everything and filled in all names and titles, but is there supposed to be a way to choose the correct heir from the options?
Hint: look at the archive about succession rule :3
Very much enjoying this game! FYI, there's a missing substitution in Letter to Talai.
I haven't been able to find the last 3 documents, but could still make a very educated guess for my last 3 characters considering the remaining titles, and this did nothing to take away from my huge enjoyment of this game. The little twists like
(spoilers)
the gender variations, including neutral gender, the compound words, the words that cannot be translated but can be understood, the succession rules being based on things one wouldn't expect based on habits of male primogeniture, usurpation throwing chaos into the expected line of succession... that's something I love in language/culture-discovery puzzles and so rarely see!
Congrats and I'd love to see more like this from you!
[checks creator page]
oh lmao yeah I didn't recognise your username but ah ok this is by the creators of My Friends The Monster Trainers and The Case Of The Dungeon Descent which I adored, NO SURPRISE HERE, keep it up you wonderful minds 👍
Love it!!!
These three documents can’t be found by searching:
Unreachable files
“Incident Report”
“The Reign of the Stalwart pt. 2”
“The Opening”
Ran into the same problem, while being at 27/30 and 45/48 and having cleared all the notifs on all 45 found documents. Meaning I might have to reconstruct some words to find the last 3...? I'll keep searching!
Thank you for checking! Just pushed a bugfix to address the unreachable documents, missing translations, and other typos.
If anyone wants to catch up, here are the search terms for the now-reachable documents. (I also cut a doc that wasn’t needed.)
Search terms to check
Sartina, Eirlov, seilaitLove this! Found every document and filled out the tree. I noticed a few typos and formatting issues:
Minor issues
Performance Evaluation: "You Royal Highness"Transit Solution Report: “have has”
Basheel’s Journal on the Exile Telai: “*driveway”, “*cousin-f”
The great passage proposal: “change” (should be “chance”)
Letter to Talai: “*grandchild-f”
I loved this! Had a great time piecing together the relationships between people and the story of this little kingdom. The titles are a nice twist on the Roottrees formula, since many of them require a bit of thought or interpretation.
It looks like there are a couple passages with untranslated words that slipped through:
- Basheel's Journal
-Letter to Talai
-Transit Solution Report (maybe?)
I’m about 10 minutes in and I’m loving it so far. Another delightful logical deduction game from Jamwitch!
I think there is a typo in the “Letter to Talai” note the game says
*grandchild-fAwesome game! I'm loving the increased popularity of narrative deduction games since the Roottrees are Dead. I managed to solve everything, but I'm still missing 4 files. Obviously, they aren't necessary, but I'd love to be able to find them and get more of the story!
The numbers seem to refer to search terms, not necessarily the number of documents. If you want to make sure, try checking every possible search term. There are some hyphenated words that you’ll need to type into the search bar, clicking the word won’t work because it’ll only search for the half you clicked on.
edit: Nevermind, I see what you mean now about the ##/49 at the top of the archive. I’m still at 46/49 even though I searched for everything from the ones I have. I’ll need to try typing in a few things and see what works.
edit 2: I had to check the game files, but the last three documents can’t currently be found by searching, they’re not in the top three results for any of their search terms. One of them seems kind of redundant, one of them is a part 2, and one of them directly states a motivation that you probably already guessed if you finsihed everything.
I’ve now fixed both the unreachable docs and also this unsearched count issue with compound terms!
Fun term deduction idea! Language and logic! Will play tomorrow!