How much has Malaysian developers Cellar Vault Games injected local culture in their upcoming game Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open, you ask? Apparently, the game’s dialogue were originally written in “the authentic broken Malaysian English”.
As revealed in a tweet, the developers have opted to have the game use normal English, but has teased that the option to enable Broken English will be included in the spooky narrative game.
Malaysia is a multi-ethnic country where its citizens are likely to be multi-lingual. They not only speak in Bahasa Malaysia (Malay), as well as English, some folks also speak their mother tongue language which includes several forms of the Chinese language (including Mandarin) and Tamil, to name a few. So there are regular instances where certain words get borrowed, and some grammar rules bended, when folks speak English here. It’s sort of like Singapore’s Singlish, but less codified. Some locals would refer this manner of speaking as “rojak”, a reference to a local mixed salad dish.
The flavour of this Broken English will specifically blend Hokkien, Cantonese and Malay words into the English dialogue.
In Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open, players take on the role of Ting, who can see spirits. A demo is available for the game right now.
Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open will be out sometime in this summer (Q3 2024) for the PS5, PC (Steam), Xbox Series X|S and Switch.