The Weeping Knight

Georgia's national epic is eight hundred years old, and most people who know it had to memorize it at school. This is that story as something you play. You are Avtandil. A knight in a panther's skin appeared at the king's hunt, wept, cut down the men sent to take him, and rode away without a word. Tinatin has sent you to find him. You have three years. WHAT YOU DO Speak verses. When it matters you do not choose fight or flee. You choose a verse from the ones you have earned, and you say it out loud to someone who needs to hear it — and you hear it read aloud as you do. Speak of courage to a man drowning in grief and watch it fail. Land it and something in him gives: the grieving man goes quiet and thoughtful, and now he needs to hear something else. So you are not picking an answer. You are reading a person, and planning what to say next. Learn verses by heart. Put a verse's lines back in their order from memory and it carries further when you speak it — in Wardrop's English, or in the four-line shairi Rustaveli actually wrote, which is how you learn it when the English runs the lines together as prose. Learning one costs five evenings, and evenings are made of the three years you have. Spend the three years. Every road, every argument, every verse said wrong takes days you do not get back. The moon on your screen wanes as they go. IN GEORGIAN, OR IN ENGLISH Every verse the game speaks is narrated in both languages. Play in Georgian with English on the screen, or in English with the Georgian beside it, and switch whenever you like without losing your place, mid-verse if you want to. The Georgian is the critical edition text in mkhedruli. The English is Marjory Wardrop's 1912 translation. If you grew up with this poem, it is here in the language you grew up with. If you are learning Georgian, every verse you earn is line-aligned against the English and read aloud in both, and the memory drill runs on Rustaveli's Georgian. WHAT YOU SEE Illuminated miniatures from the 17th-century Tavakalashvili manuscript and Mihály Zichy's 1888 plates, alongside newly made scene art. Every scene ships with its depth map, so tilting the device opens real space in the picture rather than sliding it about. The poem's own mood carries the color: battle runs cold and hard, love warms, grief drains and slows. PLAINLY Free. The whole poem, all five acts of it — no unlock, no subscription, no ads, no energy timers, no wait-or-pay, nothing to buy at any point. Everything the game can reach is on your device the moment you install — all five acts, both voices, the art — so it plays start to finish with the network off. The complete poem is inside this app, but you do not open it from a menu. You earn it, stanza by stanza, by playing. Shota Rustaveli, Vepkhistqaosani, c. 1200. Wardrop translation, 1912, public domain.