Lekta - language puzzle
A downloadable game for Windows
Lekta is a language puzzle game which generates a new language each time you play.
The puzzles need you to understand the language to solve them.
Find texts in the world and decode them to progress.
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Lekta is sort of inspired by tasks from the Oxford University MLAT (their admissions test for languages & linguistics). They give students invented or unfamiliar languages and the questions challenge them to work out what they mean. They're actually quite fun to do, so I thought a game based on that premise could work (but with fire and bears..).
People who've studied linguistics will find this easier than people who haven't, but really it's just a big puzzle. It does all work logically, and each text is supposed to teach you some vocab or grammar or help with what to do in the world.
CONTROLS - I tried to make it so that anyone can play it, so you can use WASD or arrow keys or just click to move. Your player will just move towards wherever you click, so avoid routing them over pits or fire. The tools & texts panels appear on the right and left - click to use a tool or view/hide a text. You can click and drag the texts around to see more than one at once. Z and X zoom the camera in and out.
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If you're finding it hard, there's a video on how to get started here:
There's a hints page here:
https://pandateam.itch.io/lekta-hints-page
..and this document explains some relevant language ideas (see screenshot):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nrt8xSslKq2UI5PDEgKAsaP5eB3HreCCCvIgbZdzF5A/
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* THIS IS A PLAYABLE BETA - EXPECT SOME ROUGH EDGES *
Updates:
9.11.25 Added a little endgame coda
18.10.25 Finally sorted end-game bug. Tweaked a few other things like what order the tools display in, how voicing/devoicing works, and bug where it wouldn't generate a new language on player dying seems fixed in testing. Also sorted interiors drawing at a distorted aspect ratio. Grateful to the people who found the bugs and generously pointed them out (in incredibly specific and useful ways) when that must have been annoying to run into when you've basically solved the final puzzle
20.9.25 - Tackled bug with end-game thing not generating correctly; added smooth camera zoom; fixed thing that made some high-frequency morphemes always start with R; made it so it doesn't re-roll if you die consuming a concoction
17.8.25 * New build released * LOADS of new things (see devlog)
One more clear happened *just* before release so the 8 people who cleared the alpha build are in the credits. Updated hints page too. Called this 'green build' because the icon's green & it helps me remember what's in what build
15.6.25 - 6th & 7th clears- well done all :) I have time to work on this at the moment so next build isn't miles off..
19.1.25 - 5th clear! Name will go in the credits on next build..
17.9.24 - 4th clear :) Name will go in the credits on next build
15.6.24 - 3rd verified clear, and first by someone I don't know - bravo Krili99! I'll put a list of champions in the next build so everyone gets their credit
23.4.24 - 2nd verified clear :)
21.4.24 - fixed a bug that was causing a serious problem with one item in inventory; sorted out movement so using the GUI no longer counts as a click to move the player. The bug was behaving oddly so if anyone has problems, let me know in comments and I'll tackle it again. Next up: will probably add an easy(er) mode..
13.4.24 - another big-ish update -> changed default zoom level so everything's a bit more readable; fixed a strange bug where one text wouldn't let you collect it; tidied up the zooming so it remembers your zoom level changing rooms and after viewing texts; added a new vegetable; made one room handle lots of ingredients better; upped the scale it draws one of the texts at (was a bit small before)
6.4.24 - raised max frame rate to 60 FPS; added camera zoom (as several people have mentioned it) and it works, but making the texts all draw while zoomed in would take a lot of reworking so it zooms you back out when you view a text
17.2.24 - big-ish update, smoothing difficulty curve a bit & fixing some bugs. Added a new location & updated map; rejigged location of some items to give more natural progression; updated spade text to be more obvious; fixed annoying bug if you entered interiors from above; made edges of the chasm look a bit better; added highlights to pickable-uppables, to make the stick especially more obvious; tidied up the objects GUI panel, which was messy and not very readable
3.2.24 - added varieties of mushroom, partly to teach negation better; switched to more clearly readable font on charcoal sketchbook page; eliminated a sneaky way you could circumvent final puzzle; sorted an annoying bug with the texts GUI panel not highlighting texts that are being drawn
26.1.24 Verified clears: [ 1 ]
21.1.24 - added a baby bear
20.1.24 - PUBLIC release - tidied up the victory room and added option to enter name for credits for alpha testers who complete it; improved falling script a bit
16.1.24 - made it a bit easier to infer how negation works (added an extra instance of it, was probably too hard before)
14.1.24 - improved the syllable generation code & vocab allocation code; added a new way of marking plurality; added new house with interior to try to space out player getting texts to more digestible sequence; tweaked map to include new house
1.1.24 - added tips page to try and help stuck people (I might do a little explanation of what concepts like plurality/negation/morphology are at some point..)
28.12.23 - tweaked fires a bit, sparks can now set other things alight and spread the fire
26.12.23 - added save slots; fancified the fog a bit
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Added a little endgame element to Lekta54 days ago
- Big Lekta updateAug 17, 2025
- New release is close..Aug 13, 2025
- What's the current plan?Mar 03, 2025
- How much puzzle/how much world?Apr 06, 2024
Comments
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What a fascinating game! We loved the linguistic and exploration aspects of it so much. Really interesting and satisfying staring at this list of texts and slowly working out what words/morphemes mean what. Thanks so much for making it!
We found the same bug as described by Christina 23 days ago, and so were unable to complete the game. We tried 3 times to drink the (presumably final) concoction, but it never helped get past the snakes. We were always told either "you are feelin peculiar" [sic] or "you experience bodily disquiet", and lost half our health, and sometimes at that point died and sometimes recovered. Either way it always teleports us back to just north of the fields, which is annoying when we'd been about to enter the burial mound. We're pretty confident we've understood the recipe correctly, including the negative element and the correct mushrooms; we tried 2 or 3 copies of the ingredient that was plural; we were always making it with the ingredients in top to bottom order. We wondered if in the cases where we drink the concoction and manage to recover after losing half health that might mean we're now immune to snake poison, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
We also had a weird case where we lost all lives in our first game; started a second one immediately; and the generated language was *very nearly* identical. The word for the water trough and one other were different, but everything else was exactly the same - grammar, vocab, structure etc. First time the water trough was "water"+an unknown morpheme, but second time it was "water"+"warning" which made us wonder if we need to avoid using water from the trough in our concoctions.
OKAY, that's really useful feedback - I will return to the bug-fixing mines as soon as possible to iron things out.. I'm a bit torn on whether to take this build down while it's buggy and put up the one I know is completable. I might put both up with explanation (it sounds like you very much deserve to finish it!)
You're right, that is the final bit, and it sounds like you absolutely do understand the recipe (if you get it right you should get neither message and health should be fine). Odd re the regenerated language, I'll check that (it might not be re-rolling it properly on re-start - it's WATER + CONTAINER for the trough). I'll fix the save location thing asap too, that's easy to solve 👍
I'm glad you got some enjoyment from it and I apologise for the frustrating end(!)
Would you be okay if I put your name in the credits? (It's been very useful having such specific info on what was breaking!)
Sure, I'd be honoured!
Okay, great, ta! :)
I've tried now 6 times. I find understanding the languages very easy, but for whatever reason the ingredients in the bowl always results in death. I do them in the order they appear (and exclude the negative one), and I've been doing two for any that are plural. It's unclear which mushroom to choose (fronded or not) when called for, but I have plenty of lives so I try both. I've had games where no mushroom is needed, but still it always results in death. Is there some secret to this test I am missing? Or is it just broken? I've even looked at the tips and there is nothing there beyond what I already knew.
Also, the game crashes any time you press the letter 'r'.
Re the mushrooms - on the charcoal art page it says which of fronded/frondless mushrooms are dangerous - but if you've tried multiple times it sounds like there could well be a bug (especially as you've clearly worked out plurality and negation). Thanks for letting me know - I'll do testing and add an update if needed (and if you've got a save at that point it should work on a new version). I'll take the current build down for the previous one while I test (I'm busy this weekend so it might not be for a little while). Thanks again - and apologies for it being frustrating
Yes, I figured it was the safe mushroom based on that text, but did not have success with either.
While you are fixing the bug, there is another bug (unless there is a reason for it that I missed):
The list of dangers always includes the word 'small mountain' on the list, but without obeying the typical spacing rules (always no space, even if language typically has spaces).
Another more major bug, if you ever reload a save, then it remembers the vocabulary words but not the grammar. Spaces between morphemes disappear and the pluralization system changes.
(EDIT):I just remembered another bug - the text that is a tool catalog sometimes the text overlaps or is cut off in the top left if the words are longer. The word 'tool' can cover the words for the colors, which in turn can run off the page.
I have some more comments/ideas for improvement.
1. For plurals, I recommend adding reduplication (lak x2 = laklak). It's possible it's already there and I just never saw it.
2. For prefixes and suffixes I recommend adding vowel harmony as a possibility. (lak -> lakwa, fig -> figwe) I saw one instance of something similar with consonants (shiks in plural was zhikz), and that was interesting.
3. The words for 'black' and 'white' (and the negative) are boring because they always fit the pattern "rV". I would recommend removing that constraint and letting them be more random.
4. Negation seems to always work the same way. I would recommend making it more like plurals with a variety of forms. (e.g. lak 'frond', zamu 'plural', o 'negator' -> lakozamu, olakzamu, zamuolak, zamulako, lakolak, olaklak, etc. etc.)
5. The word order for 'antidote' (neg-death death-poison-water) is always the same. Why not mix it up for each language? Similarly the word order in the titles of certain other texts.
6. The wording "Shovel! Dig!" on that text confused me a bit. Maybe something more ambitious like 'Dig herbs and potatoes with shovel!' - more fun to work out :)
Hope these are interesting and/or helpful!
This is genuinely very useful feedback, thank-you! (Incredibly precise, and you absolutely understand how it all works, so it's well-informed). I'm going to implement some of those immediately (e.g. you're right about white/black - and that's easy to fix. Adding the grammer settings to the saves is pretty simple, too). Some would magnify the complexity a lot - in a perfect world I'd like it to randomise SVO each time but that'll need some thinking about. It actually is set up to generate different possible styles of intensifier, with reduplication as one option, but I haven't used that in a puzzle yet - the problem with it for things like plurals is how hard that then makes fitting everything on the texts (if it generates heavy syllables and then they're reduplicated on top the text could be 3x as wide as its minimum version). I like the idea of vowel harmony - I haven't done things like that because I want it to be fun for people without linguistics backgrounds but I could always put behind the 'full' setting.
I've tested a bit (I need to do more) and it does sometimes generate a recipe with one of the ingredients undefined, so I will fix that and put a new build up (though it might be a while). One thing I think might be affecting its trickiness here is that on that build it generates a new recipe every time the player loses a life (so that people couldn't just brute force it) but on reflection that's quite unfair, especially given the game doesn't tell the player that (& it'd make sense someone with notes on the recipe would assume it hadn't changed before trying again). I'll change it on the next build. I did manage to complete it but it *was* inconsistent and I understand it being very frustrating after it takes time to decode everything, so I will get to fixing it..
Again - this is genuinely very helpful -> I have 2 friends who test builds for me, but they're busy people and can't always do it immediately, so hearing about things that've broken in detail like this is very handy, thanks :)
Ha - well you're right, I definitely didn't notice it changing after each loss of life. They way I played was always to have powerpoint open on the right half of my screen and take screenshots of all of the texts and put them up on the right. So I never looked at them again in-game.
Super fun concept and can't wait to see how it evolves. Thank you for sharing this!
One thought: The idea of generating a new language is super fun and innovative. But combining having to take physical notes with the loss of saves mechanic might be a step towards frustration rather than difficulty and stakes for a "thinking-heavy" game. Basically, I would love to unravel the language but personally the idea of losing my progress turned me off from the idea.
Thanks for the feedback, it's useful -> I can understand not liking that, I have been wrestling with how to mitigate it in the next version (e.g. adding extra lives for solving puzzles along the way). I do think I underestimated how strong loss-aversion is (and I understand it, the player's time is valuable).
The reason it's there is so that people can't just brute-force puzzles - in the next version especially there'll be a big puzzle with 16+ options, and a text tells you how to pick the right one but with infinite lives a player can just try all of them. Also, if someone can work the language out, the knowledge they use to do that is transferrable from one run to another (e.g. once you know you can work out plurals from comparing the word for birds with the word for the (singular) bird in the water on the animals sketchbook page, you can then easily work out plurality on future runs too), and if you know how to get in the bear's cave you can do it immediately on subsequent runs. But I understand that actually taking physical notes is pretty involved and it makes sense people don't want to lose that effort.
Also I do think the version that's up at the moment is just probably too hard, in that the jump from the first puzzle to the second is very steep. So I'm adding something between them to try and smooth that out.
If you play the next version I'd be very interested to hear if you think it's improved or not, but thanks for the comment and I'll keep thinking about this.
Oh wow! This was a concept that I was wondering if people had made into a game. Really cool idea! I will definitely give your game a try.
I was also wondering if the syntax and morphology are procedurally generated as well? Or if not, will you be trying to implement that in the future?
Ah, great! It's nice that someone likes the idea! :) (I know it's quite niche)
Yes, the morphology is randomly generated, within some constraints -> so e.g. plurality and tense can be marked by prefixes/suffixes (or in a couple of other ways), and if it is affix-based then the affixes are picked randomly from the possible high-frequency morphemes it generates (i.e. shortish ones). I would like to make the syntax choose randomly more (e.g. between SVO/SOV/VSO/whatever, and maybe head-initial or head-final structure) but every extra thing makes the code a bit messier, and also until the player's got some nouns to work with it's hard to do much with other classes, so at the moment (in this build) tense isn't really involved/needed to understand things. So I haven't tackled that yet. I do want to do some tense puzzles later on though, definitely 👍👍