Influent | iOS Review

When I’m not hosting The Gaming Outsider podcast or playing as many video games as humanly possible, I work as a 4th grade teacher in my hometown. Education is part of my daily life. Not only do I teach my students, but I’m always looking for new ways to educate myself as well. One thing I’m severely lacked as an educator is a second language. My district has a large Hispanic population, and my Spanish is basically non-existent. So when I learned about Influent from Three Flip Studios, I was immediately intrigued. What better way to broaden my horizons as a teacher than start learning Spanish doing what I love: playing video games!

Welcome to My Pad

In Influent, you control a character by the name of Andrew Cross, an inventor. His latest creation is a device called “SanjigenJiten,” which will tell its user the name of any object it sees in a different language. Interestingly enough, I learned after playing that SanjigenJiten was the name of the prototype for the game. It translates to “3D Dictionary,” which is the best way to describe this “game.” I use this term loosely, because this is a learning tool above anything else. There’s very little gameplay, and it acts more like an interactive set of rooms to explore and learn pronunciations of words.

Andrew’s technology has apparently been stolen, so his answer to solving this problem is…interesting. Rather than calling the police or something that makes sense, he chooses to run a livestream on a fundraising website. My guess is the developer wanted to tie in to the game’s history, as it gained momentum through Kickstarter.

Anyway, Andrew is locked in his apartment because…reasons. But he’s not alone. He’s joined by an artificial intelligence version of the very tech he invented and is trying to keep it out of the hands of a thief. He seems okay with this problem, however, and decides to spend his extra time learning the names of items in his apartment in a foreign language.

3D Dictionary

The is truly the best way to describe Influent. You control Andrew in a fully 3D environment filled with a multitude of objects you might find in a guy’s apartment. You simply walk around, click on objects, and the pronunciation of that object in your chosen language is dictated to you. When you find a word you’re ready to begin mastering, you add it to your vocabulary. Once you have at least fifteen words, you can test yourself on them in a number of different ways. The one I used the most simply gave me the word audibly and visually, and I had to find the object in the room. But there are several other ways to test your vocabulary. For instance, you can hide the visual prompt and try to remember the word just based on the audio cue.

The only real “game” aspect I discovered is another test of your knowledge. Rather than clicking on objects to select them, you’ll pilot a small airplane to fly around the room and blast them with lasers. It’s fun for a while, but controlling this in a 3D environment without a controller ends up being a bit cumbersome. I found it easier to walk around and click on items instead.

The Road Map of a Culture

Influent is a free download that offers purchasable language packs. There are over twenty languages to choose from, each one costing only $3.99. Whatever language you choose has over 400 words available to learn, and the library is still growing. I only experienced the Spanish pack, but the others included Japanese, English, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, and even Hindi.

As great of a tool as this app is, I’d say that it’s a far cry from all you need to learn a language. To be fair, I don’t believe that’s what they’re going for, at least with this version. This is purely a vocabulary learning tool mostly focusing on nouns. It does touch on adjectives and verbs a bit as well (at least in Spanish). But I didn’t come across any sentence structure or conjugation in my time with the game.

I also felt a bit lost after stepping away from the game for a day or so. It does a decent job explaining what you’re supposed to do at the very beginning, but when I logged in later, I had forgotten what I had to do in order to progress. I would like to see the tutorials available in the menu, as it took me a while to remember what I was supposed to do.

I’d recommend Influent as a starter guide for learning a language, but not for fluency. It’s much more engaging than simple flash cards or listening to the same language learning tape over and over again. My hope is that this is the start of something even grander, because it’s a great start. There’s clearly a lot of love put into the project. I just worry about its ability to compete against the likes of other language learning products out there.

To hear me talk more about Influent, be sure to listen to Episode 369 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:12:03 time stamp.

This review is based on an iOS copy of Influent provided by Stride PR for coverage purposes. It is also available on PC via Steam.