You know how in fantasy worlds, its all english? Kinda breaks the immersion a bit. I wanna find something where they make it as realistic as possible, and make everything in a fictional language, basically using subtitles as the main way to understand the plot.
Chants of Sannaar is a puzzle game where all of the text is written in a new language
I. Love. This. Game. SO MUCH.
Devastated when it was over.
Would recommend Case of the Golden Idol for a similar detective vibe.
I specifically liked the linguistics aspect, wrapping my head around the languages, but this does look interesting too so thanks for that :)
Far Cry Primal is completely in the fictional We ja language.
Star Trek will occasionally throw out the full speech Klingon, but they are usually subtitled…
Some of the DVD/Blu-ray versions of “GalaxyQuest” have the entire movie dubbed into the weird screeching alien language as a quirky bonus feature.
Thermian. One of the all-time greatest gags we lose in the streaming era.
Just watch a foreign movie mate. Smth in a language you do not know.
PS. Otherwise look at English ones in the way Tolkien intended. Its translated for you from a fictional language.
Lord of the Rings purports to be a translation of the fictitious Red Book of Westmarch, with the English language in the translation representing the Westron of the original, translators need to imitate the complex interplay between English and non-English (Elvish) nomenclature in the book.
The Gollum game has a paid DLC for Sindarin (Elvish), though the game is pretty horrible.
You haven’t experienced Shakespeare properly, until you’ve heard it in its original Klingon! /s
WallE?
As far as video games go, an obvious answer is the Sims.
Perhaps only slightly less prominent is Shadow of the Colossus. Insofar as I know all of the spoken dialog is a nonsense fictional dialect that definitely isn’t Japanese, except possibly when calling your horse’s name. The language is based off of syllables and random bits from both Japanese and Latin with some of the syllables being spoken backwards, and with a kinda-sorta Japanese style cadence. But it’s utter gibberish, and only the subtitles make it intelligible.
I think Ico and Last Guardian from the same company use the same language
ICO and Shadow of the Colossus don’t have a lot of dialogue, but what they have is in a fantasy language with subtitles for you to understand
First thing that comes to mind is the video game Tunic, where the objective of the game is to decipher the language.
Secondly, Stargate (the movie) while not entirely or majorly in a fictional language, the alien characters speak their own language consistently, and part of the plot involves how they communicate. In the TV show they forego of that because it would be a pain to have new languages every episode, so you do have to suspend your disbelief for that, but the movie is golden in that regard.
Then there’s other stuff like Sims or Shadow of the Colossus where everything is in made up languages but it has no impact in the plot or mechanics.
The Panzer Dragoon series, except for Saga which is only partly in the fictional language.
Thee following are more little/no dialogue for the purposes of Immersion, rather than subtitled
Tunica is an unapologetically difficult isometric action/puzzle game
Animal Well is a metroidvania with little/no dialogue
Other similar games are Fez, Hyper Light Drifter
Some notable language-based games:
- Tunic
- Chants of Sennaar
- Heaven’s Vault
- I Mother (not released yet)
Spoilers about Tunic's language
The writing in the game is actually an alternate way to write English phonetically/phonemically. So the game technically is in English but you can’t understand it. There are guides on how to read it, but it always seemed like too much effort for me so I never did.
It’s not fully the type of answer you want, but there is an Italian book called “the revolution of the moon” that is 90% written in dialect. The first pages are mostly Italian with some words in Sicilian dialect, then the dialect part gets more and more prevalent until it’s only dialect.
It’s not exactly what you mean in the sense that the Sicilian dialect really exists and that the book clearly exploits the similarities between the dialect and Italian for the reader to understand.
