Influent review: learn a language by crashing planes

It sometimes boggles the my mind just how much language learning has changed over the past ten years. As someone who learned Chinese by poring over textbooks (the paper kind) and flipping through literally thousands of hand-written notecards, I sometimes feel like language learners today are spoiled for choice. There are so many cool tools out there now to help you learn a language!

One of those tools is Influent, which was launched on Steam in late March. The game, which was developed by Three Flip Studios in collaboration with Japan’s University of Tsukuba, costs $9.99 for your first language, and then $4.99 for each additional language, and it does come with quite a few. At the moment, the game offers Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, English, Spanish, Swedish, French, German, Russian, Bulgarian, and Latin options.

Gameplay

Influent drops you into a regular (if somewhat cramped) apartment filled with stuff. You can explore the apartment in the first or third person, click on anything to hear and see its name in your target language, and press the space bar to save any words you’re interested in to your vocab list. Once you’ve got ten words saved, you can do Time Attack tests, where you’re given a word in your target language and you have to click on the item it corresponds to as quickly as possible. Once you’ve mastered enough words, you’ll also unlock a Fly By mode, where you can fly a toy spaceship (again in first- or third-person) and shoot lasers at the item instead of clicking on it.

Here’s a quick video that shows off the game’s basic gameplay. In it, you’ll see me collecting and testing new words in Korean, and then later in the video you’ll see me playing some Fly By mode in Chinese.

I found the third-person controls to be really unintuitive for a gamer, but thankfully the first-person controls are what you’d expect from any FPS. The plane-flying controls are pretty good in both modes, which is good because that’s the part of Influent that’s the most actual fun. Frame rate issues, a few bugs (you’ll see one in the video above) and the cramped space make flying pretty difficult, so you’ll crash a lot. But I still had fun zooming around the apartment shooting tiny lasers at the objects I was looking for.

To keep you entertained, in addition to the Time Attack and Fly By modes, there are also some challenges you can complete to unlock rewards. These tend to take the form of collecting or mastering a certain group of words, though, so they don’t really change the gameplay at all.

If you’re not already looking to learn a language, there definitely isn’t enough game in Influent to entertain you on its own merits. But as a vocab memorization tool, it’s certainly more fun that paper notecards. And the value of interacting with these items (at least a little) and creating a visual memory for them probably can’t be overstated. Hearing and reading words in your target language while looking at that object in a natural setting will help a lot of people, especially visual learners, pick up vocabulary more quickly. That said, Influent does have some limitations.

Not quite fluent

To begin with, it’s important to note that Influent will not teach you to speak, or even read, a language. This is a vocabulary game, and there’s nothing here that will help you with grammar or sentence construction, or even teach you basics like the alphabets. As such, it’s definitely best used in combination with other learning tools that’ll help you put all the vocabulary Influent teaches you into practice.