I know this is a ttrpg community rather than a video game community, but I’d like to chime in and say this is something I really liked about Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
You start off illiterate, but there’s a quest to learn to read and afterwards, reading more books and such will improve your reading skills. Starting off, anything you read is literal gibberish, but then it becomes semi-coherent text with typos, and as you progress, it just gets clearer.
I could see this being something you could also incorporate in a ttrpg to add an extra challenge to your players.
There’s also something like this in The Outer Wilds. The player character is given a tool to translate the writings of an alien race that’s long extinct. In the Echoes Of The Eye DLC you investigate the colony ship of another alien race, but you have no way of translating their writings. Your only option is to infer what happened to them via investigations and by viewing picture slides.
I was not prepared for how significant an impression it would on me to not be able to read everything. This already-spooky new location where all the furniture is distinctly far too big for me suddenly felt so much more alien
I always thought it was a neat touch that all of the writing on walls and non-interactable terminals in Warframe were some space-gibberish that meant fuck-all to me. That’s the only other example I can think of.
I know this is a ttrpg community rather than a video game community, but I’d like to chime in and say this is something I really liked about Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
You start off illiterate, but there’s a quest to learn to read and afterwards, reading more books and such will improve your reading skills. Starting off, anything you read is literal gibberish, but then it becomes semi-coherent text with typos, and as you progress, it just gets clearer.
I could see this being something you could also incorporate in a ttrpg to add an extra challenge to your players.
There’s also something like this in The Outer Wilds. The player character is given a tool to translate the writings of an alien race that’s long extinct. In the Echoes Of The Eye DLC you investigate the colony ship of another alien race, but you have no way of translating their writings. Your only option is to infer what happened to them via investigations and by viewing picture slides.
I was not prepared for how significant an impression it would on me to not be able to read everything. This already-spooky new location where all the furniture is distinctly far too big for me suddenly felt so much more alien
I always thought it was a neat touch that all of the writing on walls and non-interactable terminals in Warframe were some space-gibberish that meant fuck-all to me. That’s the only other example I can think of.