The open-world word puzzle game Lingo is truly special and has become my favorite word game ever made.

I have a massive playlist of edited videos about it, and have made over a dozen custom maps on it.

I have sort of wondered if there is a specific thing that makes it so special, that other games could take inspiration from. Why are many other word games obviously a lot less inspired in their design space?

After all, Lingo itself has game design inspired by The Witness with nonverbal communication, and usage of 3D space for a game interface that seemingly could only take place in 2D. Much like The Witness, the 3D does actually have an important point - it allows the 3D-involving puzzles to not be obvious that they are using the world, and expands the possibility space even in puzzles that end up not using 3D, but that's not the whole story...

This article obviously will have spoilers, so either play the game or watch the playlist where I cover the early game.

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/lSnrDhJICK0

There is also an article "Adventures in Word Puzzles", by another early player and modder of Lingo, that has this quote:

Lingo has a lot of tricks that help the player deduce the solution to a puzzle, outside of how the text on the panel is crafted. Many puzzles are hinted by nearby puzzles that share a theme or combine to a greater solution. There's also a set of words that the game is fond of that are repeated across multiple puzzles, which means that you can sometimes figure out a puzzle just because the solution word is salient from having seen it earlier on. This in itself is a form of "second hinting", as I've suddenly chosen to call it, and it's likely that I'll end up using it in some form in my randomizer.

These secretly repeated themes throughout the game are cool, but those still aren't the mechanics that make it special.

Creator quote

The creator of the game, Brenton, has said this about it (when discussing the design of Lingo 1 vs. Lingo 2):

The Lingo 1 mech structure was one of those once in a lifetime, lightning in a bottle, accidentally tripped over this thing idea. I can't do that again. I'm always trying to think up things that haven't been done before and I hope whatever Game 3 is, it has a similar kernel to it.

It is also interesting because, well, Lingo 2 has not quite had the same level of sheer innovation in modded content as Lingo 1. 'symbols' map to 'colors' and many ideas for mechanics have already been done in Lingo 1

Are the base rules extremely simple?

As you may be aware, your mentality of a game is way different before you play it, when you're just learning it, and when you finish it. In fiction 'characters' start as strangers, then you subconsciously buy-in to them, and they become familiar faces, could be said for all of life but also applies to mechanics.

There is something incredibly pure about using colors as a representation for mechanics, so it is very easy to get attached to.

Plus, thematic and literal repetition is also more visceral when descriptions for the mechanics become fundamental instead of arbitrary, especially as puzzles start to involve more elements.

A literal description in a sentence of a more complicated Lingo puzzle would often be way way more complex to describe than the player who is ingame conceives the puzzle to be. Here is what it would be (spoilers!):

"Synonym of ATTACK, conceptual addition of TOOTH, letter-removal of ATTACK - the answer to two of those three puzzles put together make the answer to the third word. Some meta aspect of THAT (pointing to the 'TOOTH' block), (add letters to BOTH + some meta aspect to BOTH (pointing to the 'TOOTH' block) that share the same answer), some meta aspect of THAT (pointing to the 'TOOTH' block) - the answer to two of those three puzzles put together make the answer to the third word."

Does it create a system that fits many wordplay mechanics into a broader theme, which also expands your mind by extension?

Before I ever played Lingo, I was of course familiar with obvious wordplay-related concepts like 'anagram' and 'palindrome'. What was amazing and cohesive was managing to put all of these into a system that did not even require those terminologies to exist to make sense of, and that also deeply sparks the imagination due to having unused aspects that custom creators can build upon.

In a display of how 'complexity' is actually subjective and concerns audience expectations, Baba Is You also hugely leverages an English-speaking audience. Spelling 'a sentence' and having an effect is natural. Using text to refer to objects, then literally having the word TEXT appear is an incredibly meta thing. The well-known fan mod of Metatext can be recursive! The base game left so much untapped potential with words and what could target what (I have played years of new Baba mechanics and it still hasn't run out).

It's kind of odd to think that in both examples I make the point that the games leverage something fundamental about 'the real world', even though the English language is not actually fundamental, but might as well be. Mystery games like Ace Attorney and cross-examination/contradiction logic finding are broadly using the rules of real life so their design space is also infinite, and you could fit any story in an Ace Attorney-like format.

Maybe what's also special is that in both Baba and Lingo, the game mechanics allow you to draw some surprising connection between things that should be very far apart. In Baba "EMPTY", "MIMIC", and "MORE" are very mechanically distinct, yet just by being pushable text they fit in the same game. The wordplay in my Move Counter game is also something that is similar in the way of connecting faraway concepts. It could be a game jam style challenge to connect two seemingly utterly unrelated things like 'stairs' and 'curtains' and 'constellations' and you may get something interesting if you followed a chain between them.

Lingo 2 in some ways could have had a moment where symbols were revealed to be extensible and expandable like a conlang.

There have been some thoughts I've had for a long time, about making a language learning game, or math/periodic table memorization game, that's actually good. The problem is so many people have also tried to make language learning games, often with the problem of getting tacky educational vibes, or that the topic is actually just way too big to be useful to people who seriously want to learn it.

If you try to make a realistic periodic table learning game you suddenly have to try to make covalent bonds a game mechanic. Lingo: "Level Apple" involves learning Japanese through Lingo, but that doesn't scale you to 2000 kanji and everything. And also you likely wouldn't make that for $0, or $10, probably instead $10 a lesson or $10 a month for all the effort it'd require.

I hold hope one day that these games can exist though!

Recursive art is basically always very visually instantly appealing and distinctive. It captures feelings like infinite detail, infinite depth, surreal bending of space, unanalyzability to some extent. This is something I've been enchanted by, but that's by no means limited to me.

I was inspired to make this article due to a chain of things. A recent 3Blue1Brown video, "How to take the logarithm of an image", shows a piece by M.C. Escher, and how it's actually made is with a 'normal' (unwarped) piece of recursive art that can be mathematically described using a logarithm that warps the image:

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ldxFjLJ3rVY

Interactive recursive worlds

Inspired by that video, Print Gallery of an Artist was made - by Daniel Linssen, the creator of excellent puzzle games like Leap Year and HopSlide that I have covered on my channel.

This hit the itch front page, and gave a whole new group of people the experience of how it feels to be in a recursive universe. But of course, it's not my first time.

In Patrick's Parabox, a box-pushing game where boxes can contain levels in themselves, you can push boxes into other boxes, and even a level can be inside itself. This is an amazing hook, for me I immediately wanted to know:

How does it feel to play recursive puzzle games? Surreal?

I would say:

• It connects parts of physical space that are seemingly unintuitive to connect.
• The adjacent squares of the recursive boxes matter a lot, and less experienced players are not as easily able to see connections and paths made by that.
• The levels where the key moves involve important bits that are 'offscreen' or small in some way, are hardest to notice.

There is also a special one of 'getting your bearings' which is so interesting, and you definitely feel it more in Print Gallery of an Artist than in Parabox. See, there is one particular level in the 'Reference' section that constantly zooms out:

In Print Gallery of an Artist, it can often look like there are multiple copies of an enemy, or a collectible, even if you 'know' there's only one. Especially in the fractal geometry it's hard to tell, but also a very strange feel of the fractal geometry is that sometimes the character you're looking at becomes too small or (less interestingly) goes offscreen, and you have to switch what character you're focusing on, as if you should have an eye tracker when broadcasting this game to people.

It sort of messes with the default impulse to be managing multiple characters in a platformer! If there's only one player and you're dodging fireballs, you're safe for 'all' the players on screen.

While you don't quite have the curved fractals and action gameplay in Patrick's Parabox, there is still a part of the same feeling in Parabox where you need to switch what character you are looking at in the two Reference levels with the constant zooming in. A part of me wishes it was more frequent in the game, but that level has apparently caused motion sickness in some.

While writing this, I thought about what other tricks you could do with the camera, and thought you could tie in camera zoomins and zoomouts to entry and exit, even negatively valued ones (where you zoom out at a time you'd normally 'zoom in' for a huge disorientation).

There is also this special moment:

Some of the playful bonus levels in each world are "ASCII" levels, which present levels in a totally different layout where you see all boxes at once. This also cuts out the recursion visuals, and this feels different in an interesting way. Adjacencies and chains of adjacencies are somewhat less obvious, but some 'misleading' aspects are removed - it makes it clear there aren't multiple players, multiple infinite boxes, etc.

It's just so odd, because there are worlds like "Swap" all about basically turning the recursion stack inside-out, and the surreal visuals make this seem like a very distinct operation (and, it is) but those visuals just don't apply in the ASCII version.

And obviously there is no sense of dizziness, in fact you can press a button to turn off the visual effect in Reference by just pressing the '7' key, though I find it a cognitohazard to tell players this too early or to use it on every level.

That makes me wonder:

Is this sense of dizziness anywhere else?

Anything that involves self-reference seems to dodge attempts to understand it in a simple way. Things like "This sentence is false." seem to annoyingly cleave at your distinctions of truth and lies despite being so simple. But specifically in the attempts to 'think about' a statement like that, to give it a truth value only for it to logically flip to the other one. Some paradoxes even target and defy fuzzy logic, third categories, etc.

But I think the common ground is paradoxes that send you 'in a loop' somehow, like the expected value of the 2 envelopes paradox of switching the same two envelopes nonstop.

The problems can feel like they have a life of their own getting ahead of you.

Learning about recursion for the first time, with things like the recursive definition for Fibonacci numbers (fib(n) = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)), or even solving equations defined as functions like f(x) = f(x + 1) - 1, requires a certain kind of thinking to get used to, to be fine with a function not having answers unless it calculates a large amount of times before 'bubbling up' to the final answer.

I also feel like trying to think about mathematical induction is recursive-like, where you prove a statement is true for n=1 (or some other base case), then assume n = k is true, then prove for n = k+1. Recursive functions also often have a 'base case' - the Fibonacci numbers do too - and the way that you often morph an assumption to prove the next one, while also assuming the truth value of n = k, it's both unintuitive and recursive-feeling.

Other infinite media

There are games a bit like Patrick's Parabox but are 2D with a continuous grid instead of a rigid one.

In these, the player does not 'scale up and down' to perfectly be a 1x1 block, meaning that changing your scale by going through different recursion levels is a mechanic. Jack Lance's INF is also quite similar.

The scaling reminds me of the 3D recursion in Maquette. When small, it takes FOREVER to traverse a big world, and the game ultimately needed to be rigidly locked down in terms of design to not get out of hand. It has mixed reviews for having 3D as a visual setpiece and walking simulator instead of puzzles.

Things that don't feel like recursion despite being recursion, and vice versa

The game "Recursed" has chests that teleport you to other chests. But because it doesn't really have visuals to show what chest leads where, there is no cool visual quality to this recursion. I think the game really could have used that feature as well as a minimap.

In addition, just looping does not fully feel like recursion. Programming-wise, many functions implemented with recursion could also be implemented with a loop (which is called iteration). It's kind of cursed that often in recursion examples, the normal looping function is faster and more obvious what's happening.

Visually speaking, looping can give vast and huge feelings too, such as in Manifold Garden, a game with infinite looping worlds:

I do think Manifold Garden had a feeling of lost potential, despite how visually stunning it is, and I couldn't put my finger on it for a while. It was not quite that the puzzles seemed maybe a bit small-scale and enclosed. I think it is that the dream for these types of games is imagining the vastness, looking at how far away you can go and see and still not reach the end. This implies potential secrets and aberrations within the infinite, and I wonder if there could be more of that. (The secrets in that game kind of go there, I suppose, but not the maingame.)

It is also hard to call a real-life phenomenon 'recursion', but a hall of mirrors, or pointing two mirrors at each other, also has this sense:

Overall, I think what's awesome is to capture the 'big' in some way, whether it's an unbelievably large amount of 'small' beneath you, or just taking a small glance at the 'big' above you. Both in 2D and 3D.

Small setpieces and other miscellaneous stuff

I consider "exploring the world while small", or "exploring the world on a different gravity" and such things, incredibly high potential for the feeling of a world being of infinite depth.

The Stanley Parable also uses recursion on its title screen for a neat effect:

• A video, "Universe in a Box" by Buttered Side Down, with a literal "PARABOX" is a short film based on 3D recursion. Playing Parabox you notice some small inconsistencies as to how this would really work, lol
• Superliminal's finale involves a classic recursive moment of undefined behavior that's given a dramatic ending.
• In Patrick's Parabox, there is a level near the end of the game where the camera focuses on a place that isn't the player, which is also a bit disorienting.
• Patrick has released a game called Bubble Sort which is a different take on rooms-in-rooms.
• Baba's Bababox implements Parabox mechanics in Baba Is You.
• The custom Lingo map Luodongo has a moment where there are 3 layered castles and you get to experience recursion in it. This is honestly shocking it was made in this engine.
• The custom Escape Simulator map The Devilish Diorama and The Devilish Diorama 2 are incredibly awesome experiences with recursion. I have a video scheduled on it, stay tuned!
• I'm Too Big for the Target is a much smaller puzzlescript game where the recursion is 'obvious' after a minute, and very well made.
• One of the images in this article is from I Made a Game About Recursion (Game Inside a Game Inside a Game Inside a Game).
• Check my Empty Escape Room video for some 'video' recursion.
• How much more is there to explore in this genre still? We have had 2D, 3D, warped curved 2D space, I guess we need warped curved 3D space, does Hyperbolica count cause that's just a 'sphere'...
• Time loop games don't really count unless you can 'travel to a time' and get something back out, probably
• Fractals probably don't count enough, is there a game where you explore a fractal
• Can there be recursion in Baba rules? The game in fact has infinite loops, but not recursion...

For even more on this topic, I wrote this as well.

(I suspect there are even more examples of recursion, this site very much needs a comments section, or at least an indicator of community)

For those who don't know who I am, check my main page for all my projects. Over the years, I've created lots of games, hundreds of videos for semi-daily video content, and lots of puzzles.

However I'm starting a new thing today. Because, TIME IS PASSING BY SO FAST!!! Sort of inspired by Inkhaven (a daily writing challenge for a month with on-site mentors, which is coincidentally happening this month too, and my previous Thirty Time Signatures project where I made 30 pieces of music in a month last year), I always wanted to write about a lot of interesting stuff and share it with people. Although because of unhappy events, and even though this is very insane to say, I feel like I'm primarily writing this more for a certain entity.

They can be any length, about any topics, but probably primarily about game mechanics, puzzle game releases, etc.

Also I intentionally don't have the style of journalist's purple prose game-review-sites. To me the unbelievable overuse of filler, fancy fluff metaphors with fake and needless specificity is grating (also unfortunately that is basically the default LLM writing style... and some people love it, even people who dislike LLM's if not told :skull: :skull: very existentially frustrating). I care about compact and relevant information.

Enjoy these articles while they last, I don't know how long they will.

Some preview teasers of topics I have in mind:

• Recursion in games like Patrick's Parabox
• Sense of scale in games
• Puzzle-adjacent genres like detective games and even strategy games
• Specifics on theming and marketing
• Past projects
• Interactibles, spoilery topics on surprises in certain puzzle games

I have an RSS here.

also remember to poke all toads. This beautiful toad will change every day.

Coronation - a Lingo 2 fan map by Morphious86 that is Lingo 2 recreated in Unity and playable in browser - was so cool to me, amazingly faithful to Lingo's design.

If you haven't played it, click here or watch my video!

The creator expressed wanting to recreate this project in Godot for a Lingo maingame DLC - but the browser aspect is so novel that I wish it was referenced ingame. I wondered briefly if the Godot version having differences and surprises compared to the browser version so people would go between versions to compare aspects (almost like mint in level 2) would be interesting as well.

However I've also had some other Lingo-related ideas for a while, predictions of things and moments that Lingo 2 could do that never quite happened. With the github source code release of Coronation (ty for providing it <3 ) I was interested in making it somewhat... but I never used Unity successfully before and just spaghetti messed up the code.

Because of this, it feels like these ideas might kinda languish in my mind, so I feel like I should release them to see if others are inspired by it.

Typeryder

Yes this image is real. (ok the keyboard is edited in a way but yes a unity-dropped city is actually in lingo :frog:)

Basically, I will turn Lingo 2 into a puzzle platformer :walc

But also it'd be an insanely cursed contrast to have a surprise experience where suddenly you are in Unity-Asset-Store experiences, highly detailed realistic environments but with the Lingo UI on top.

And with Coronation being in Unity it's not as far as it seems from being possible!

But then again I tried and I couldn't even get a tree to not display with a bright magenta error texture :frog:

Anyway here are some more:

• Seeing letters and words physically in the environment with the right perspective
• Having a "meta keyboard" that controls your ability to use actual keys, which includes WASD.
• The additional keys can have some standard stuff like R = Restart and C = Crouch, but also high speed, high jumping, flight, etc.
• Having different key pickup colors was so cool in Lingo 2, so:

• White Pickup Keys allow you to access a new meta key ability, so yeah you would pick up R to restart (there would be puzzles about checkpoint tricks too). Ideally it would be fun if every letter corresponded to the first letter of the ability name in a way, like "W = Walk Forward", "S = Step Back".
• Gray Pickup Keys are the equivalent of the "one-use" (purple) pickups. This is kind of funny with WASD because what 'one use' means is one continuous hold of a WASD key, but you lose it if you let go (but you regain your gray keys usages when you [R]espawn), and you could make a puzzle that requires one-copy of WASD, and 4 panels each blocking a door to force you to un-hold WASD and 'consume' the key.
• Black Pickup Keys make you lose a meta key.

• The opening scene could be getting hit by a car into some sewers and rolling down slowly until you hit a white "W" or something. Though this messes with potential gray key progression (in that it's strange to get a white W then replace it with a gray W), maybe instead you hit a white "R", respawn somewhere and fall on a gray W.
• Of course, regular panels still exist, and I did wonder if, when in a panel it should freeze your keyboard so you're not using meta keys anymore, or it could do troll things where you type R in a panel and whooops you just reset your position. That's probably a bit too troll though?

The vision is that it would be so cool to have meta-keys that had stuff where you flied around and collected chains of letters and did midair fly dashing stuff in L2. You could even imagine a L2 panel with multiple solutions allowed, and the word you type BECOMES YOUR META-KEY keyboard layout to solve a platformer puzzle.

Other ideas:

• Gold Keys that reveal that letter in the answer.
• Take away your Escape key, YOU CAN NEVER ESCAPE etc

Anyway I'd also be interested in level design for this project but yeah it'll be hard to make with the lack of code existing and all lmao. Chiristpohpeoriovey Souvey even troll-commented in my face by saying that the white/black key system was probably simple enough to implement in one day or something, but only after I implement it, and with my lack of programming skill that's not happening :frog::frog::frog::frog::frog::frog::frog:.

This is such a longshot but it would be so cool if this was like the basis an ultimate lingo 2 customs collab, that's my dream anyway, even though Gen Alpha people have already memed l2 customs :walcomebuck:

ok the last 2 images arent actually-in-unity ok

after a small convo with the legend the coronation creator i thought of these additional points:

• even if it's a maximally gimmicky experience and each ability is very shallow there's still so much novelty in the experience that even if there's only like 1-2 minutes of content for the 22 gray letters + 22 white letters it's still like a 44 minute+ experience!
• M = minimap and could reveal stuff from the sky's pov maybe (although it might conflict - as in it prevents you from just looking at it from a bird's eye view naturally instead of just pressing M - with the idea of "seeing letters only visible from different perspectives" that i really wanted with lingo 2 lol)
• collecting one-use letters from the sky to use them like air-dashing
• one of them definitely a 'dash' or speed boost ([Q]uickness maybe?)
• one of them definitely some sort of super jump (J?)
• F to fly for some very short amount of time?
• more "hub like" metroidvania structure where climbing on buildings or other high stuff are there to be ascended to (in partial contrast to puzzle rooms which would be more enclosed I suppose)
• there is a twister-like meme quality to the idea of needing to use many keys that are far apart, but unfortunately we can't expect everyone to have n-key rollover keyboards to make that meme really happen lol