Influent Language Learning Game

you won't actually learn a language through this game at all and having to pay for each individual language is just greedy Edit (response to dev): Wow…. This developer goes around responding to all negative reviews with lengthy replies in a condescending tone. I stand by what I said. This terrible and boring game does not help you build vocabulary any better than Duolingo. All of the vocabulary is limited to things you find in a 1 bedroom apartment. It’s a useless waste of time if you want to learn a language. As you can see, I have invested 40 hours into this game. I bought all of the language packs. I wish I wouldn’t have. EDIT #2: LOL... unbelievable. The developer changed their response because of my edit. I will post their original response so that you can read it and I will also post their updated version incase they change it again. ***Original Developer response: Robatato [developer] Posted: 30 Jun @ 9:03am You will in fact acquire a solid vocabulary by playing Influent, which will greatly assist you on your language learning journey. It gets really exhausting having to explain to people that learning a language is a life-long endeavor. No piece of software will ever be able to teach you everything. Influent is an engaging VISUAL way to acquire new vocab words in a relatively painless game environment. Lastly, there is nothing greedy about selling languages piecemeal. Most people only want to learn just one and I personally worked with native speakers to translate, record, and implement all the assets for each language pack. This is no small task. If you really want to learn multiple languages, I've actually provided a rather extreme discount for the Polyglot Bundle, which includes all languages packaged together. For those reading this response, take a look at the bundle options at the bottom of the Influent store page. ***2nd Dev Response: Robatato [developer] Posted: 5 Jul @ 9:48pm Influent isn't intended to make someone fluent on its own. Its goal is to help learners build vocabulary through visual context, and many players use it alongside other language-learning resources. Each language pack also required its own translation, native voice recordings, and implementation, which is why they're sold separately. For anyone learning multiple languages, there's a discounted Polyglot Bundle available. I understand Influent won't be the right fit for everyone, but I wanted potential buyers to have that context when reading this review.

If you want to buy this game for Japanese - don't. There are only ~400 words and at least half if not most of them are english loanwords . The story, humor and art design are very "Reddit" and the controls are confusing.

Good game for learning by absorbing rather than translating. It's basically how we learn when we're toddlers. We SEE the thing, then we HEAR the word (from parents or other caregivers). There's no preexisting word for the THING when you're first learning language. The textual portions of the game help to clarify when the intent of the game isn't perfectly clear but don't get caught in the "THIS equals THIS" trap (translation); just absorb. One word of warning to new users, though: the reverse lookups are a bit confusing. If you have trouble, just know that there are five (5) floating stars, find the one that matches the prompt and double-click it. If that doesn't help, do what I did: start a game in your native language and play it. When you get a vocabulary list, choose one of the reverse games and it should become clear. By the way, I don't think this game is intended to make a user conversant in the selected language. The game is for learning vocabulary. Useful but not a substitute for verbal practice with other people. That isn't a knock against the game, I just want people to understand the nature of the thing. Enjoy!

Influent is a language learning game where you try to explore an apartment to learn words related to the stuff inside. Most of these are nouns for household objects, but there are some verbs and adjectives included as well. I mostly used it for Russian (I'm upper beginner) but I also tried it in Spanish (I'm upper intermediate). To play the game, you walk around the apartment to find vocab words. When you click on the objects, you can add the words to your vocabulary list. You can add nouns just by finding them, but you'll need to earn stars to unlock the adjectives and verbs. To earn a star, you can either add 10 words to your list or master one of your words. To master a word, you have to pass all five star challenges, which each give you a different prompt and have you find the object or choose the vocabulary word. It takes a little while to get the hang of the controls, but once you do the game is pretty easy to play. Some of the words are a bit hard to find, as some of them are inside of cupboards or are parts of a larger object. Long sessions tended to get kind of boring, but I enjoyed short sessions of 10-20 minutes each. Influent is like a more dynamic version of a flashcard app, and does have some strengths. All of the words have native speaker audio recordings, and if your target language has a different script than your native language, you can toggle between the actual script or a transliteration. The words taught correspond to normal household items, but aren't limited to the most common ones. As an upper intermediate learner, some of the words were not yet familiar to me, but they are objects I see every day. There are a lot of different languages available, including some languages that are less common languages to learn. The game doesn't let you reorganize your word list, so once you add a word it stays where it is. If you want to review specific words on your list, you have to pick the page they're on, and you can't move words around to drill them in a more customizable way. The adjectives and verbs are each tied to a specific object. You can't just pick any green object, you have to choose the object where the game gave you the word, and some of those were harder to remember than others. Inlfluent is a niche game with a pretty narrow purpose. If you are no longer a total beginner in your target language, but most of the words on the word list are still pretty new to you, I think Influent is an engaging way to learn them. If you're getting into the intermediate stages, it's too limited to be useful, and you'd probably have more fun learning/practicing any words you don't know in a different way. It's also good for getting a taste of a lot of different languages, and you get the best value if you sample a few of them. 6/10

Very boring, lots of bugs, audios and words are incorrect, etc. I bought and played this back in 2020 and stopped because of these reasons, and just decided to try it again to see if it has been improved over the years, but it seems to have gotten worse. Do not recommend. Just get one of the free apps on your phone if you want flash cards like this game basically is.

I bought this game many years ago but never really touched it. In the past few months Ive been aggressively learning Spanish with Duolingo and just remembered I had this so I figured I would play it as a complement to Duolingo. Honestly I think it has a good premise but I cannot recommend it. The controls and just understanding what do is a nightmare. I'm honestly baffled with how infuriating it is to do simple things.

As others may have already said this is more or less a flashcard-like program, and honestly you will get as much out of this game as you put into it. You can continually amp up the difficulty as you go, especially with Japanese as you can progress from Hiragana to Katakana then to Kanji (good for beginners to intermediate learners). What I don't think people appreciate enough is connecting words to visuals (rather than your native language), and associating verbs with objects (both of which this game does). If you're serious about a language and are still learning, I would honestly suggest this game as a fun supplemental word collector. This is an underrated and underappreciated language aid. Cheers to Rob Howland for an awesome game!

This game is my favourite language learning game. The focus on highly tangible vocabulary is great because non-tangible elements, while important, can really interfere with the FUN of learning a language which can feel too pushy or overly punishing. At times when I feel disheartened or bogged down by my learning journey I have found this game to be a haven for continued curiosity and engagement. And it really is great for learning vocab! When I learned Japanese years ago I often thought what if I put vocab stickers on a whole bunch of stuff in my house. Well, now I don't have to and a huge bonus to this is all the words are read aloud by a native speaker. I think hearing the words helps a lot to solidify them in memory as opposed to just reading them - especially early on. In my experience Japanese words tend to sound how they're written, but since I've moved on to Korean I have found a huge benefit to hearing the words as well as reading them. I'm really very impressed by how many words are included in Influent and the number of languages available to learn. There is another game called Shashingo which has a similar concept, but quite limited vocabulary and only for Japanese learners. So, yeah, the game is great! And please be nice to the dev. He's just one person so be patient :)

This game is actually the thing that made me realize I wasn't bad at remembering vocab, I was just learning it the wrong way. I am autistic with ADHD and my brain remembers things a lot better when I play this game. The mechanics and music are quite fun too! It is an excellent game to play late at night when you want to feel productive and proud of yourself. I'm only a few hours into the game but I hope the world is bigger than just the apartment, because I could learn so much German from playing this game. As someone who went to university for linguistics, I have noticed that some aspects of the game mirror actual psychological learning tricks, such as pairing certain nouns with verbs and/or adjectives that are related somehow (like pairing "book" with "read") to remember them better with theme association. It truly is the subtle things like that that help me learn and this game does it really well. I am excited to see what Rob does with it next!

I don't know what you expect in a game that promotes language learning, so I don't know if this game will let you don't in terms of fun, but I do think it is good for learning vocabulary. I thought it might be gimmicky, but turns out it is well thought out, with just some rough corners. Overall, I'd say it's a good vocabulary builder with a bit of a small scope (for now at least). The screenshots do a good job of illustrating this, what you see is what you get. For instance, I thought that a game that involves words and looking at stuff would only feature nouns, but there are adjectives and verbs, though nowhere as many. To be honest, I like how that anchors those words. You learn 眠る/to sleep by interacting with a bed, and then you point at the bed to show you have learned the word (more on that later). I think that's a very interesting and effective design choice. I'd love to get a sequel or expansion in which language chunks (small frases, commonly including verb+noun combinations) are used in addition or instead. With some mastery of the target language however, you could try to imagine those language chunks yourself. Anyway, the game has a story that is kind of connected to the tutorial, which feels a bit long, but that's okay. I can't speak to the ending, I've only mastered a few words out of I don't know how many hundreds. The gameplay is learning the name for each thing (with some synonyms you can choose from) and then quizzing yourself in five different ways (two assessing your text recognition of the word, two for audio recognition, and one for audio+text). You can choose between point and click or point and shoot, and there are three ways to get around the small apartment in which the objects are laid out. This works very well, and it doesn't take long to learn the interface (though I wish I learned that you can open stuff with right-click sooner). At least for me, just clicking on things and learning the words was fun. The quizz part was okay too, I feel like it was an effective way to learn vocabulary. Unless there's something I haven't seen yet, I don't think there is a way to learn any grammar, as you won't be putting together any phrases or sentences. There are enough words to make this a worthwhile exercise though, and it's nice that with a one-time purchase you can learn the same words for a different language. If you are interested in many languages in the same language family or languages that share vocabulary, such as European languages or languages that have borrowed some Chinese vocabulary (Japanese, Korean, etc.), this selection of words can help you to compare and contrast, maybe even spot differences in pronunciation, and so on. Before concluding, I'd like to highlight that, while the game is not perfect, it shows a great deal of good design in terms of what it is trying to achieve. So far I've only tested Japanese, and it helps that you can switch between different spellings of the same word (漢字、ひらがな、romaji). In the screenshots, I can see that the Spanish version includes articles for each noun, which makes it easier to learn the gender for each noun. Just in case it wasn't clear, you also get the audio for each word. Not a small feat for a solo dev, by any means. Anyway, it's a good vocabulary builder. It's not revolutionary, but I certainly wish the dev the best and I'll be looking forward to anything else they produce. Oh, and did I mention the soundtrack features songs by Lifeformed? That's a plus in my book.