(Three Flip Studios; Designed by Rob Howland)
What is it about?
It’s a first person (kind of) sandbox game where you walk around someone’s 3d apartment clicking on stuff, and then the computer says what the item you clicked on was in your “target language.” You’re trying to gather a bunch of words and then be able to recite them back. You build vocab lists, and interact with a little robot (you can even become him and fly around, which I found easier to control), and shoot down the things you’re trying to collect with a little toy plane.
The kinds of play at play are few but mighty. The first is Discovery, as you’re trying to explore the rooms and uncover the objects and label them, figure out what each of them are. The next is Challenge, as half of the game, when you’re not looking for the items is you testing yourself on whether you know what the words for the items are. That’s pretty much it, the other areas of fun exist in some ways in this game, but it would be shoehorning them in.
MDAO Framework:
The mechanics were pretty simple, but frustrating at times. The world consisted of objects that you had to click on to hear what they were, and double click on to open their word page. This was especially annoying because the only way to move around was also to click and drag the screen so you could move your camera. This was until I figured out you could just be inside the robot and move around in a more free-cam direction. The seek and destroy mode was interesting, and I imagine it working if you play it a bunch of times.
Dynamics
The scavenger hunt rhythm created repetition and also created a literal mind palace, so when I think of what word was that? I can center myself in the reality of where these items physically were in-game. Another dynamic was the curriculum itself—because there’s so many items, you’re able to curate the lists based on what you want to learn.
Aesthetics
All of the objects are well-made, but sometimes I was confused about what an object was, and clicked on it just to find out, not to learn how to say it in the language I was going for. I think also that the music on repeat in the background, and very little story elements was such a downside, I was immediately bored and ready to put the game down. I think that’s a problem.
Outcomes
For me: modest noun gains, weak long-term retention without adaptive review, and low engagement over time. For beginners, it can jump-start vocab + pronunciation; for sustained learning, it needs spaced repetition or broader contexts.
I played in Brazilian Portuguese, a language I’m learning very quickly on my own terms, by talking to ChatGPT and using the internet, and I felt like I was not achieving the learning goal—the outcome for me was boredom, and maybe learning a bunch of nouns. I can see how it can be helpful, but it’s extremely limited, at least what I saw. It’s only items in an apartment! What if I wanted to learn about stuff in a city, country, farm, train station! I’m sure they can and will expand, but it was not a compelling game for me, and I didn’t feel like I was learning.
