Ginger

This game is not for everyone. Many, many people will bounce off it. I will try to be as clear as I can about what Ginger is, how to preview it, and the kind of person who might like it. Firstly, look on the Steam store page and find the "View the manual" link in the info side panel, near the information about developer, publisher, and release date. Click it. This PDF is a dump of all of the text in the game, and as far as we know, it's 99% of what the game actually *is*: a dictionary written in an unknown language, and you have to work out what each word means so that you can read it. The game doesn't ever tell you, it's all up to you. The game doesn't ever tell you if your guess is right, it doesn't even have a facility for you to enter a guess. All of that happens outside the game. Does this intrigue you? Keep reading. Does this annoy you? It's not for you. This game has been out for 42 days at the time of writing, and a handful of people on the Discord have been puzzling away at it. We barely know anything: we have a few words that were used in the Controls page of the game; we know the words for counting; we know that "zuli" refers to a person; we *think* that maybe "ee" i…

I really wanted to enjoy this. As someone who loves languages, figuring this out seemed like a fun challenge! Then I actually opened up the game. I like a puzzle, I love House of Leaves...but Jesus ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ christ, this is not it, my man. This goes beyond a fun puzzle and has turned into a professor's pet project for Linguistics. Impressive but not fun except to a small group of people. From what I can tell, there's no real benefit to the game itself outside of the dictionary that's provided as the 'manual' of the game. My best guess is that it's there for the color-coded pieces to figure out what words are what sort- adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. If you want to figure out how to PRONOUCE the words in the dictionary, by all means, pay for the game and enjoy. If not, just grab the dictionary itself and try smashing your face against it to figure out what the hell it all means. I'm done. Call me weak, call me simple, I don't care. I stopped playing obtuse puzzle games like Myst a long time ago, and it's certainly not something I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ miss. Like I said, impressive but you have an interesting idea of what fun is, dev.

let me tell you something magical: if you hang around deciphering, sometimes(not often, only happened to me once) you might listen to random pretty music recordings from the author. i know i did. and for some reason that elevated it all so much? a delight for linguistics enthusiasts and puzzle fans alike.

Unfortunately I am too dumb for this one, didn’t get it. From my minimal understanding this game has you flip through a dictionary as you try to control a mouth, tongue and throat to speak and learn the words, basically speaking in tongues. The linguistic, experiment and study style gameplay intrigued me but you’re truly dropped in the deep end and I had no idea what to do. Its un-intuitive-ness is probably the appeal but, again, to much even for me. Didn’t really get anywhere at all and lacked any intrigue to continue as the entire presentation is (again seemingly) very dull and devoid of meaning on first inspection.

What a beautiful mess. If I understand anything about this game (and I don't), it's that you can program your Applied Linguistics Master's thesis onto software and upload it onto Steam. The phonetics puzzle is the first layer of this cake, a weird mechanical mouth that sputters out whistles and chirps. There is a logic to it that isn't far from your face. But then there's the dictionary. The dictionary, like our own, is self-referential. There is no translation, there is only jumping back and forth and hoping that you can decipher meaning by the fact that any singular language is auto-descriptive in a knotted ouroboros of fart noises. If there is something deeper to discover, to glean, or to decipher, I think this could be one of the most brilliant games ever made. I applaud whomever can do it, or could care enough to plot it all out in a way that makes sense. I doubt I could ever devote my time to getting there, though—I have to be honest. It's a bit much. Still, this is just the type of weird thing I love about games and language and art.

I played this game for eight hours. Do I understand my experience? No. Was I satisfied that I spent eight hours making notes and near memorizing each combination of sounds? Yes, I think so. Absolutely a game to try if your tired of understanding whats going on. 10\10 kudos to the developer for making a whole language!