Glyphbound: The Lost Tongue app icon

GlyphboundThe Lost Tongue

You are the only person alive who understands this language.

A real, invented language is born on your phone and exists nowhere else. Your ship broke apart in a storm and you wash ashore among strangers. Nothing is translated: you watch scenes, listen to people speak, write your guesses in a notebook and slowly learn to answer. In the end you read a stone nobody could read. An internet connection is required to play.

A language only you know Nothing is translated 7 places, 5 scripts Free to play
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Watch, Listen, Decipher

Every scene shows what happened, and every sentence is spoken and written in a language that is yours alone. You work out the rest.

SCENES AND VOICES

  • Watch an illustrated scene, hear the sentence spoken aloud and see the glyphs being written. Work out who did what to whom.
  • Voices are synthesized from the language's own sounds, so every game sounds different.

A LANGUAGE FROM A SEED

  • Every new game grows a fresh language from a seed: its own sounds, script, grammar and way of counting.
  • Five script families: notch, round, wedge, flowing and seal script. Pick Explorer, Linguist or Legendary difficulty.

YOUR NOTEBOOK

  • Write a guess for every sign and mark it doubtful or certain. Each sign lists every scene it appears in, so you can compare.
  • Rule cards let you form your own grammar theories. The game never says "correct"; only the world's reaction and the exams do.

SEALS AND EXAMS

  • Take your guesses to the Sage. Pass the exam and the page is sealed in red ink: those entries are certain.
  • Fail and you only hear how many guesses were right, never which. Blind guessing costs you standing, and there is one exam a day.

Why Glyphbound?

A quiet, atmospheric puzzle adventure about working something out for yourself, one sign at a time.

SEVEN PLACES

  • Harbor Village, Market, Temple, Palace, Mountain Clan, Buried Ruins and the Great Inscription. Each road opens when you understand the people before it.
  • The mountain clan speaks a sister tongue and the ruins hold the ancient form of your language. Regular sound changes connect them.

PUT IT TO USE

  • Errands, building sentences from glyph tiles, riddles, counting coins, following directions and finding out who is lying.
  • Say it wrong and you see what the locals understood instead.

CASES AND CHRONICLE

  • Cases: logic puzzles written in the foreign tongue. Read the witnesses, cross out suspects, decide.
  • Chronicle: read picture-less tablets left by a stranger who came before you.

THE GREAT INSCRIPTION

  • Your sealed words turn red on a stone nobody can read. In the end you read it in your own translation, and what you say next decides how the story ends.
  • There is more than one ending.

Sand, listening and a daily tablet

Speak freely in the Sand and see what they understood, play in listening mode with sound only, and read a new tablet every day. Every language you decipher joins the Language Academy. An internet connection is required to play.

Free to play

Glyphbound: The Lost Tongue is free; it contains ads, some of them optional, and a single optional in-app purchase to remove ads.

Screenshots

A scene with your own labels, the name of your language, a word card, a sealed page, five script families and the Great Inscription.

Glyphbound – A woman putting fruit in a basket, the spoken sentence written in glyphs with the player's own labels Glyphbound – The card that names the player's language and shows the stone nobody can read Glyphbound – A word card showing every scene in which one glyph appears Glyphbound – The seal stamp after passing the exam, with the Great Stone certainty rising Glyphbound – The same sentence written in five generated script families Glyphbound – The Great Inscription with the lines already read in red and the player's own translation

Ready to read the lost tongue?

Glyphbound: The Lost Tongue is free. Download it and decipher a language nobody else has.

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