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Influent is a language learning video game that focuses on vocabulary learning through the activation of your spatial memory.

As a gamer myself, I’ve been longing for a video game that can help me improve my language skills, so the moment I came across the game I knew I had to write an article about it!

Introduction

The game comes in 20 different languages three of which are free to play, Italian, Korean, Japanese. The paid languages include English, Japanese, French, German, Russian, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Portuguese-Brazil, Finnish, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and Danish.

How does learning happen?

The game starts in the apartment of our character. Language exists everywhere and this is what influent is taking advantage of. By exploring your surrounding and clicking on objects you will start discovering the words to describe that object in your chosen language. From clothes and furniture to kitchenware, the game offers a wide range of elementary and intermediate vocabulary.

Each word that you discover can be added to your study set and each study set can be practised through the two available games. Here’s an example of the interactive word to image matching game!

Influent is serious about your language learning and for this reason, its noun is associated with a verb, adjective, or adverb. This way students can learn common collocations with the target nouns. On top of that, there’s the phonemic script for each word so that the students can work on improving their pronunciation.

Will I become fluent just by playing the game?

The short answer is no, but give me a second to expand on this.

The game aims to improve your vocabulary knowledge, it’s not to improve your speaking skills. It’s important to know what you are going to expect from the game. I can assure you that if you commit to the game you will greatly expand your vocabulary, and on a word level improve your pronunciation. These are the two things where the game shines.

Personally speaking, I believe the game needs to move beyond simple words and include the words in context, or if you prefer in longer sentences. This way we can see how the target language is used. Also, going beyond the image to word matching can help with some variation. For example some gap-filling exercises or dictation activities with the words will increase our opportunities for language practice. Having said that, those are simple implementations and as far as I know Rob Howland the creator has some fascinating new features coming

Pricing

You can download and install the base version of the game (including the three free languages) from steam for free.

The additional languages cost 10 euros each which I think it’s a very reasonable price for a game that it took the creators hours to develop.

My thoughts

In a nutshell, I liked influent. It’s a work of passion and it deserves some recognition because it can definitely help. It gives us the tools to improve and our responsibility is to commit to the game and realise how it can help us improve realistically.

What about you? Have you downloaded the game and if yes do you feel it has helped you improve? Let me know in the comments sections below!

We keep things free and as you can see the website is free from annoying ads! Unfortunately, there’s a running cost to everything including the website and of course the time needed to create the material.

For this reason, I added a PayPal donation button to let you choose whether you want to support our website. The smallest donation can help me continue doing what I love.

Anthony Antonopoulos