WordGame: The Puzzle RPG Only Taiwanese Can Play (+ a Bit of Linguistics)

I’ve been meaning to write this one for ages but kept being too busy XD. Today I want to introduce WordGame, designed by Team 9. This is genuinely a game that only Chinese — or really, I’d say Taiwanese — players can fully experience. The concept is wonderfully simple, the gameplay isn’t complicated, but the one and only barrier to entry is: you need to be able to read Traditional Chinese XD
※ Note: I later found out they do offer a Simplified Chinese translation on Steam, though the animations use Traditional characters. So players from Mainland China can play too :D

As a linguistics researcher + Chinese literature grad + all-around nerd (?), I remember being incredibly hyped when I heard this game was coming. I played the demo, had a brief chance to chat with one of the designers, and it’s honestly a game I feel strongly about recommending to everyone XD. I’ll also sprinkle in a few linguistics tidbits along the way :P

Wait, isn’t it just a word cloud? That’s it?!

Here’s the crowdfunding PV the team made — it gives you a pretty clear sense that this is a game literally made of “text.”

But despite how visually designed it looks, a lot of people might compare it to the ASCII art people used to make on BBS back in the day, or more recently, word clouds — using text to form images.

That’s it? Is that really all there is to it?

Honestly, if it were just text arranged into pictures, even non-Chinese readers could probably play. But the real key is that while forming images from text is a major part of the aesthetics, the actual game progression requires you to understand Chinese characters, semantics, and syntax. Without that, you’re stuck.

Sounds hard? It’s not, I promise — let me break it down XD. And don’t worry, I won’t be throwing heavy linguistics jargon around XD.

The Weapons of WordGame

In the game, there’s literally nothing but text. It might be images composed of characters, or it might just be a single sentence.
The protagonist — “I” — can move freely, just like controlling an RPG character. If you’ve ever played a game before, it’ll feel totally intuitive.
The game also comes with some fun weapons that help you make progress.

Chinese Characters

When people talk about Chinese characters, the first thing they think of is “pictographs” (象形). While not all Chinese characters are pictographs (phonosemantic compounds are actually more common today), it’s definitely one of the language’s defining features.

In the game, the pictographic nature of characters gets used in clever ways. For example, when you see the character 「門」(door/gate), it naturally functions as “a connection point from one space to another” — just walk into it to break through.

Image source: WordGame Zeczec crowdfunding

And you’ll adorably see 「門」 swing open to let you walk through XD.

In certain scenes, you see 「石」, 「岩」, 「磊」 — conveying an increasing sense of more rocks, bigger rocks, without a single image needed. This works because we’ve already internalized 「石」(stone/rock) as a visual component. When it multiplies, we instinctively translate that visual feeling into meaning.

The Backspace Sword: Delete Text

Even the weapon name is a pun. 「貝克斯貝斯」is just “Backspace” transliterated XD.

In the demo, you carry a “sword” and can delete unwanted text. Sometimes just deleting a few characters can make an entire sentence disappear. The most common use: negation:

E.g. 停不住顫抖 → 停不住顫抖 (Can’t stop trembling → Can stop trembling)
E.g. 不是很舒服 → 不是很舒服 (Not very comfortable → Very comfortable)

Negation in Chinese works by attaching “negative words” like 不 (not) or 沒 (no/haven’t) — so if you cut out the negator, the whole situation flips.

Sometimes you remove characters and create entirely new meaning, which I love XD.
Can you guess what happens to the famous monster 「史萊姆」(slime) when you remove a character? XDD

And here’s an example they provided: remove 「對」 from 「我的對手」(my opponent/rival) and you get 「我的手」(my hand) — an instant change in meaning.

Image source: WordGame Zeczec crowdfunding

The Dull Gauntlet: Push Text Around

Beyond deleting, you can also push characters around to shift the entire meaning of a sentence. For example, the one from their website:

E.g. Thief: 可要你好看啦！→ 可要看好你啦！
(“I’ll make you regret it!” → “We’ll be watching over you!” [roughly])

The meaning shifts completely — from a threat to something like encouragement (sort of).
Though admittedly, 「可要看好你啦」is a bit unnatural as a sentence — I’ll come back to that at the end.

Image source: WordGame Zeczec crowdfunding

The Four-Eye Helmet: Combine and Split Characters

Not all Chinese characters are pictographs — “indicative characters” (指事) and “phonosemantic compounds” (形聲) are built by combining components. The team leverages this too. For example, their website shows combining 「喬」and 「木」to make 「橋」(bridge) — and suddenly you have a way out of the scene.

I didn’t get to play with this much in the demo, but I’m really curious how they’ll build it out in the full game.

Image source: WordGame Zeczec crowdfunding

The Possibilities of Playing with Chinese

Through RPG mechanics — collecting weapons, unlocking skills, clearing stages — what I’m really excited about is the possibilities of playing with the Chinese language itself.

Just with “deleting text,” there are already countless possibilities with negation alone. But there’s so much more. I think this could be built into a systematic and genuinely fun gameplay system:

• Reference shift: E.g. 對史萊姆一籌莫展 → 對史萊姆一籌莫展 (Clueless about slime → just generally clueless)
• Directionality: E.g. 史萊姆跑來了 → 史萊姆跑來了 (Slime is running toward you → running away)

And there’s more: moving an adjective (e.g. moving 破 (broken) from 破床 [broken bed] to next to a wall turns it into a verb: 破牆 [break through the wall]), abbreviation as object (e.g. taking the 鑰 from 鑰匙 [key] to unlock a door), and so on.

How far can you push Chinese? Will everyone solve it the same way? Might players come up with solutions the designers never anticipated? These are exactly the questions I’m dying to see answered.

A Brief Chat

A while back I had a chance to chat briefly with the game team. We talked through a few things.

Puzzle coherence vs. natural language: They’re genuinely concerned about whether puzzle design forces unnatural sentences. And honestly, 「可要看好你啦」is a sentence I really can’t imagine naturally occurring. Same with 「喬木」 appearing in context — it feels a bit forced. They acknowledged this is one of the hardest parts of writing for this game: it’s really difficult to balance “real language” with “puzzle-ready text.”

Text expressing a whole world: It’s WordGame, so naturally they want text to carry the entire worldview.

It’s hard: Because the protagonist is “I,” they can’t have any other “I” existing in the world — so the entire game can’t have the character 「我」(I/me) XDDD. I genuinely didn’t notice that.

Unexpected solutions: Since there are infinite ways to arrange text, it’s possible that in the same stage, every player finds a different solution (the demo’s escape-from-prison stage was like this). They said some solutions players found were things they never imagined XD.

Surreal transitions: Because they deliberately went with 2D, transitions ended up being simpler than 3D would’ve been. For example, the cut from falling from a great height (objective) to opening your eyes (subjective) — that would be a pain in 3D, but in the game players fall into it completely naturally.

Semantic satiation: I genuinely experienced a kind of semantic satiation partway through XD. But they said that’s intentional — they want players to feel like characters are no longer just characters, but objects, things in the world.

There’s a lot more we talked about that I won’t get into here. You can find great writeups from other outlets too.

A game made entirely of “text” — and it won multiple awards! The inside story of Team 9’s adventure building from zero

In any case — from when I first discovered this game as a player, to getting the chance to chat with the designers — I’ve been consistently struck by how much care they’ve put into it.

While I was playing, I kept wondering: could this game reach a broader audience? Could students learning Mandarin play it? Could it attract more people to learn Chinese? Could linguistics olympiad students benefit from it? Could people in text-related fields find inspiration here? Could it be used in a linguistics classroom? I think I’ll have students play it in my linguistics class someday and let them discover the language phenomena themselves. And I really hope the full version will give us even more material to work with (heh).

I also sneakily asked them about DLC status — apparently there might be a collaboration with Justfont in the works, which is incredibly exciting >///<.

Go try the demo! And if you like it, I’d really recommend jumping into their crowdfunding. The game alone is just NT$400, which is a steal. This isn’t sponsored — I don’t earn anything from the links below — I just genuinely want to share a great game XD. Recommended for fans of RPGs, linguistics, Chinese, and word puzzles <3

>>>WordGame　https://crowdfunding.wordgame.cc/<<<

Recommended system specs:

* OS: Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 / OSX 10.13
* Processor: Dual Core
* Memory: 4 GB RAM
* Graphics: Support OpenGL 3.0 (1,600 x 900)
* Storage: 300 MB available space

Thanks for reading :D

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