7 Days To End With You makes translation a (fun!) life-or-death matter

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Among the various sub-genres of puzzle games that have cropped up in the indie video games space in recent years, translation games might be one of the most obvious fits for the overall medium. After all, when playing through the plot of a video game—especially, say, a fantasy game with lots of invented terms, to pick on one genre not especially at random—you’re already doing a ton of the hard stuff that translation requires: picking up context, applying logic to guess what words mean, filling in the blanks. Translation games—and I’m thinking here of titles like Inkle’s 2019 game Heaven’s Vault, which helped cement the idea by putting you in the shoes of a literal linguist, trying to recreate an ancient language on the fly—just make “the blanks” more literal.

I was thinking about this recently because of my time with 7 Days To End With You, which came out on Steam last year, but which caught my attention with its new Switch release a week or so ago. The scope of the game, from first-time studio Lizardry, is very simple: You wake up in a bed somewhere with amnesia. And not just regular-grade, Gilligan-bonked-on-the-head with a coconut amnesia. Or even Dana Carvey Clean Slate amnesia. (These are the two kinds of amnesia.) No, you have amnesia so total it’s essentially aphasia—a total loss of language, something that becomes immediately clear when the game’s only other real character, a red-haired woman, begins speaking to you in a garble of random symbols instead of words.

And while there is a plot lurking in the background, ungarbling the garble is the over-riding action of 7 Days. The game throws you a few bones: For one thing, every word in its Wingdings-esque soup of nonsense has a direct English parallel, and the faux-language is even polite enough to maintain spellings and word lengths. (Although the language is not a straight cipher; a symbol that looks like a big-mouthed smiley face might be standing in for “E” in one word, but will be a whole other letter in another, thus stopping the game from just being a simplistic cryptogram.) Also, you can check any word to see all the examples of when you’ve seen it throughout the game; a word that seems to show up in references to cooking pots, and gardening implements, and alchemy equipment, for instance, has a much higher chance of equating to “tool,” than, say, “food.”

The final tool in your arsenal is the trickiest: your companion. Starting from early on the first day, she’ll accompany you around what is presumably her home, obligingly telling you the names of things you point at. (Even if you point at it a bunch. Sorry, lady, I’m still trying to figure out what that word you’re saying when I point to the damn wall clock is.) This is the biggest source of vocabulary in the entire game; it’s also an occasional reminder that translation is an act of intention as much as straight definition. 7 Days To End With You has some clever, slightly nasty things to say about the ways we can use language to obscure ugly truths from our loved ones; it’s to the game’s credit that it only looks like an anime-esque, romance-heavy visual novel, and is actually something significantly more twisty and odd.

Beyond that, though, this kind of translation is simply fun. There’s nothing here as robust as Heaven’s Vault, which attempts to genuinely immerse you in the syntax of a language. And as a code-breaking exercise, it’s less satisfying than, say, Tunic, which has more robust rules, and more detailed secrets, to tease out of its arcane symbols. But as a sort of cross-eyed crossword puzzle, it’s a ton of fun; I played through it while streaming, for instance, allowing me to offload at least some of the trickier translations to others. The end result is a game that makes you actually think about language, rather than merely skin the words.