The Reliquary of Epiphanius (Francesco Giovannangelo)
Played on: 21st September
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot (as recommended!) with Firefox
How long I spent: 1hr 20mins for one full playthrough scoring 85/100 points
Finally, a game that’s brave enough to call Indiana Jones a hack. The Reliquary of Epiphanius may be an archaeology adventure, but we’re going to do the archaeology right. Our player character, finding themselves on an archaeological site, refuses to dig willy-nilly for fear of damaging anything under the surface, and won’t pick up the old fragments of cutlery and pottery lying about without a good reason. You’ll even lose points in the final scoring for pocketing the artefacts, signified with an achievement titled “That belongs in a museum!” and illustrated with a little icon of a fedora. It’s kind of neat to have an archaeology game that takes it seriously, honestly.
But ultimately this is a puzzly text adventure game, and the painstaking work of digging a trench and extracting and cleaning shards of pottery is perhaps not the most brain-teasing or thrilling subject, so we do go just a little Da Vinci Code-y in our quest. Expectations are set early when our protagonist rolls into town in search of their father, who’s disappeared while searching for the eponymous lost Reliquary in the ruins of the ancient monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno. A set of easy-going parser puzzles lead us on our dad’s trail. Could it be that the Reliquary is nearby, if only a sequence of ancient riddles can be decoded? Well, you can probably guess. The supplementary material tells us that this is based on a real archaeological site, and indeed, San Vincenzo al Volturno actually exists and has been an ongoing site of archaeological interest since the 70s (thank you Wikipedia), although I think the surroundings are fictionalised.
The Reliquary of Epiphanius looks like a very beginner-friendly piece of work. For a start, it’s gorgeous. Vorple is used to integrate graphics and sound, and it looks and sounds lovely. I really love the original soundtrack, and the manual/walkthrough that comes with the game is very thoughtful. Between these quality-of-like features and the generally well-pitched puzzles, I can imagine this going on a list of recommendations for players new to parser games.
These puzzles feel influenced by the old school of text adventure design – there’s a simple maze, a darkness puzzle, and a couple of simple object interactions. Despite that influence, they were on the easier side for me (although it looks like some earlier reviewers hit a game-breaking bug with the darkness puzzle – more on that in a sec). The Reliquary encourages you to examine objects in order to progress, which is both a great tip for new players and a useful direction for solving, encouraging you to consider the information you’re getting more carefully. The one tricky puzzle is a late one that requires good note-taking from earlier in the game, but in another neat quality-of-life feature, you can take notes in the character’s diary. (Or if you’re playing in one session, you can just scroll up in the text output.)
Now, as much as I like this game, I do think it’s a little scrappy around the edges. I can’t see any beta-testers credited anywhere, so I’m not sure if this was tested. From those reviewers who hit a bug and were unable to progress (I gather due to running out of your limited light source in the dark areas), this has already come back to bite the author. I think that bug has been fixed so I don’t want to belabour the point. But I think there’s more conditional testing to be considered, especially relating to the back half of the game when a certain NPC joins you. For example, when they hitch a ride with you on your motorcycle (another great feature, by the way – the automatic path-finding to distant destinations is lovely!), the parser outputs that they are “following close behind you” every turn, implying that they are off the motorcycle and are running after you very fast – quite funny, but probably not intended. For a more spoilery example, you can examine the peanut shells in the ruins and have the protagonist exclaim “My father was definitely here. Where did he go?” while he’s standing next to you.
I’m also not sure how I’m supposed to read the story, whether it’s just a fun archaeology thriller or whether it’s making an argument. This requires me to get into endgame spoilers, so I’ll hide them under this tab:
Endgame spoilers
So we find our dad Franco, follow the trail of clues, and eventually realise that the Reliquary is inaccessible, buried in a valley which has long since been flooded for a dam reservoir. In the closing moments of the game, Franco says of the dam’s construction:
“I went through all the records, hoping someone had looked into the area’s history when the dam was built in the '70s. Nothing.”
Franco’s voice darkens, tinged with a trace of anger. “It’s ironic, the Saracens’ expansionist ambitions weren’t enough. A thousand and one hundred years later, a multinational finished the job. Man buries, forgets, destroys… And today, everything can be sacrificed in the name of progress. “Progress”… What do History, the Environment, a Territory, a Community matter, compared to a few kilowatts of energy?”
… which seemed a little strange to me. Because Franco is depicted as sympathetic (if bumbling and distractible) throughout the game, it feels like we’re supposed to agree with him, and yeah, it is a shame that the Reliquary will stay lost (although at least we know it’s not being looted!). But this seems to ascribe malice or negligence to the dam engineers, even though they couldn’t reasonably have known that the Reliquary was there, since we only found out five minutes ago? Can we meaningfully say the loss of the Reliquary has damaged a sense of community when it doesn’t seem to have factored into the community at all, given that in the first five minutes of the game the mayor decries your dad’s research as “all nonsense”? I don’t know, it feels like the Reliquary of Epiphanius wants to deliver a moral about not losing touch with our history in favour of modernity, but I don’t feel it’s supported enough by the events of the game to have any emotional impact. Also I’m not an engineer but I think it would be more than a few kilowatts. Call me a pedant.
But story aside, the Reliquary was a lot of fun. It’s easy without being trivial, the more thriller-like twists are fun, and the whole thing has been thoughtfully put together in a way that is easily recommended to inexperienced players. Not bad for an archaeology game where you don’t even melt any Nazis.