Voice of the Ancients

During the last few months, I fixed many content & engine bugs, and improved the voice command interpreter with new technologies (last chance recognition, auto help offering after two unsuccessful commands, and ignoring some common words), and added a feature to skip text using magic tap.

Happy adventuring!
Best regards,
Sasa

I finally found myself with some time to explore some of the games I downloaded and came across this. I had no idea what it was, but what a pleasant surprise and exactly what I was looking for.

Essentially it's a voice based adventure game, a little like Call of Fate (if that's the right one - the game where you try to escape a mansion). So you tell it to go north, west, pick up this thing, look at that etc. The puzzles were relatively simple - nothing gave me any problems and I'm a bit of an idiot at this sort of thing - but were still satisfying to complete. I installed Piper TTS and used one of those voices for the narrator which was nice. The story was hardly anything new but was still fun to complete. Honestly, this game was exactly what I was looking for at that moment - something to lightly engage the brain and take my mind off things for a few hours. I bought the extra chapters and was glad to do so.

The experience wasn't perfect. There were a few things that would have made it better but none of them were showstoppers.

Firstly the voice input was a little hit and miss. I would usually have to say "north" about 3 times before it would work. But when it did, it was often surprisingly quick.

Also having to download various spoken word tts voices was a bit of a pain. It told me to install Alex Premium which didn't seem to exist. (I downloaded regular Alex). So the voices of the people you meet are a bit robotic and flat. It reminded me of something - it might have been an episode of Bojack Horseman but I might be wrong. But they are in some kind of world populated with robots who all speak in a sad monotone that would probably please Eloquence lovers. In an ideal world, proper voicing would have really elevated the game. But if not, maybe it would be possible to incorporate some neural voices or something to make the game seem a little less robotic. Maybe if there's a sequel.

The other thing I found a bit painful was in the second chapter where there are some paths that result in failure and then send you back quite a long way and you have to listen to a lot of dialogue you've already heard. I think I had tried magic tap but it hadn't worked so I didn't realise it was an option until I found this thread and tried again in chapter 3. I think probably having a "Skip" button on screen would have been a good idea. I don't know how non-VoiceOver users do a magic tap so not sure how they would skip? Anyway was annoying at the time but would probably not be so bad if I played through again.

I thought the ending was a bit of an anticlimax as well given where things were heading at the time.

Anyway don't let my little criticisms put you off trying this - the first chapter is free and well worth a go if this sort of thing is up your street.

One question I have - in the second chapter there is a puzzle involving a globe and a safe. I never completed it and never found any clues (or at least I never put 2 and 2 together).

Did anyone complete this? If so, how? I'm not sure I'll go back and try it again but I am curious as to what I might have missed.

Hi mr grieves,

Thank you for the detailed write-up — I'm really glad the game hit the spot and that you saw it through to the end.

Sorry about the friction points, though. I'm actually looking into an upgrade that would make NPC voices configurable too — the same way the narrator's already is — so hopefully that flat, robotic feel gets a proper fix rather than a workaround.

As for the globe and safe — I won't spoil the solution, but here's a hint: don't assume the clue has to be in chapter 2 just because the puzzle is.

Thanks again for playing, and for the honest feedback!

What the subject says,, voice input is extremely not private and there are quite a few situations in which one might prefer what they're doing to stay private.

Hi Jim,

Totally fair concern — voice input does mean anyone nearby can hear what you're up to, and that's a real downside if privacy matters in your situation.

That said, voice isn't just one input option among several in VOTA — it's the core concept of the game. The idea from day one was that your own voice is the only thing you need to play, nothing else. There are already plenty of good text-based adventure games out there; VOTA was built to go in a completely different direction, so adding typed input would mean changing what the game fundamentally is, rather than just adding an option on top of it.

I know that's not the answer you were hoping for, but thanks for raising it — genuinely appreciate the feedback.

Best regards,
Sasa