So to Speak is an upcoming puzzle game that helps teach users Japanese vocabulary, kanji, hiragana, and katakana all at once.

Edutainment isn’t a genre we cover often, but in a way aren’t they just puzzle games where the solutions lead to practical skills? In So to Speak players are tasked with matching words and signs with objects and concepts introduced in the environment. The ultimate goal is to learn some Japanese along the way so you can actually watch anime without subtitles.

As you progress along the path, we come across a city and now we get to explore a bit. We go beyond the simply vocab and work our way up to names and places; train stations, hotels, banks. This is only the tutorial of the demo but we’re already learning a lot!

In a video posted by the developer we can see some later stages where we use our handy dictionary to help introduce us to concepts. We learn how to offer congratulations (Omedetou) and tell a friend something is cold (Samui). The game has the potential to go deep into vocabulary and sentence building.

Ultimately this is a straightforward puzzle game but it represents an underserved niche in the gaming market for educational games. Duolingo figured it out early that language-learning can easily be gameified and for years has basically been cornering the market. We’re excited to see educators take matters into their own hands and go one step further with an actual game.

So to Speak is coming to PC via Steam later this year!

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