It’s pretty wild to see all of the different approaches to game design out there across different genres, ranging from titles that are tightly focused on a specific mechanic and making the most of it, all the way to others that seem determined to give their players a little bit of everything, and in some cases even more than that. Shujinkou may just be the most oddly ambitious game I’ve ever played in that regard, no lie mixing together a pretty traditional dungeon crawler with (checking notes) a means of learning Japanese.

Starting with the gameplay itself, I’d say it’s somewhere in the middle in terms of overall presentation, structure, and variety. You won’t be crafting your party from scratch, you’ll instead be working on core characters that you’re able to customize, but that also helps there actually be story beats worth following, so it’s a solid compromise. Visually it’s not the sexiest either, adopting a more practical workman-like look that functions and performs well, and the labyrinthine scale and complexity of some dungeons more than makes up for the less impressive looks. In terms of language instruction, I do appreciate the approach and it’s a sensible one. Depending on the settings you choose, it will simply pepper in words in another language that you can see used in context, with the option to then look up more about it as well to fully understand it. While it’s hardly going to give you something akin to Babbel, I wouldn’t say it’s wasted effort, and it does give the game a novel angle. The fact that you can tweak the frequency of it is also appreciated, so you can adjust it for your own taste and degree of interest.

Of course, I would say that there are some real casualties to the game trying to do a bit too much, and early on that means you’ll be going through a slew of different pages of tips and instructions, making it a slog to get started. I won’t say that much of the help those screens give isn’t helpful, I’d consider a lot of it important information that helps you get going. But I would still argue that maybe slowly dripping in new systems and elements to spread all of that out could have really helped though. The game doesn’t need to go from 0 to 100 in the first hour, you can ease the throttle up to full power and let the gameplay breathe a bit more. What you come out of this with is a reasonably-good dungeon crawler with a story to tell, and the opportunity to pick up some Japanese along the way. Whether that’s going to be on people’s lists as something they’re dying to go play will be a matter of taste, but I absolutely respect the effort and desire to make something daring, for sure.