What are some other video games that have created fake languages/speech?

March 8, 2018 7:35 PM

I'm intrigued by fake languages/speech that characters use in video games. I'm thinking of games like Celeste, Splatoon 2, or The Sims. Those are just a few off the top of my head, what are some other examples?
posted by Fizz to Society & Culture (15 answers total)

Best answer: TVTropes: Speaking Simlish
posted by xyzzy at 7:42 PM on March 8, 2018

Response by poster: Should have realized that a place like TVTropes would have it all in one place.

*facepalm*

That's a good resource. Thanks for sharing.
posted by Fizz at 7:46 PM on March 8, 2018

The Animal Crossing games use Simlish-style voices.

Fumito Ueda's games (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian) feature fictional languages. Unlike the synthesized speech in the other examples here, the voices in these games were recorded by voice actors, and the languages have a realistic variety of sounds and words. The two main characters in Ico speak different languages.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:49 PM on March 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

If random phonemes count, Q-Bert.
posted by zippy at 12:29 AM on March 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

A peripheral case: The little green men and women of Kerbal Space Program, the Kerbals, don't speak at all in the game, but the marketing around them has a lot of CG animated scenes in which Kerbals speak a gibberish which I've read, but never confirmed, is Mexican Spanish played in reverse. The developer, Squad, is based in Mexico City, hence the Spanish.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:03 AM on March 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Papers, Please uses it a lot and doesn't appear to be in the tvtropes list.
posted by skynxnex at 4:25 AM on March 9, 2018

Fez has whole fictional symbologies and writing systems.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:10 AM on March 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

Okami. (Also, just get it and play it. It is rad.) (PS4 remaster: $20)
posted by sexyrobot at 5:41 AM on March 9, 2018

I really enjoyed the language(s?) they were speaking in Pyre, which is also a great game that you should play!
posted by Grither at 6:20 AM on March 9, 2018

Some of Goichi Suda/Suda51's early games do this, notably Killer7.

At various points in that game, the player encounters mysterious apparitions that offer clues, in electronically garbled, half-intelligible speech that sounds like a mashup of multiple languages, and often differs from the supplied English subtitles.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:32 AM on March 9, 2018

The Gostak is a classic second-wave parser-based text adventure game which is entirely written in a made-up lexicon (albeit with English syntax and function words) -- even down to the "help" and "about" text! In this case the fake language (and figuring it out) is the entire point of the game.

Absence of Law, an entry from the latest IFComp, also has a puzzle about learning lexical items from a fake language, but it's not the focus of the game and it's a bit partitioned from all the rest. IMO the partitioning also means the actual means of interacting with the fake language is a bit awkward.
posted by inconstant at 8:38 AM on March 9, 2018

Panzer Dragoon
posted by Bangaioh at 8:42 AM on March 9, 2018

It's not a simlish type of nonsense speech, but BioWare's Jade Empire included a wholly fabricated language called Tho Fan.
posted by figurant at 9:02 AM on March 9, 2018

There are Lego computer games like this. (Can't recall specific titles.)
posted by whitebird at 11:45 AM on March 9, 2018

Monster Hunter World has "Monster Hunter language" as an option for audio languages.
posted by thefoxgod at 4:29 PM on March 9, 2018 [1 favorite]