There’s plenty of photography games nowadays where you’re off loose in the world to snap pics. But this little indie gem in development, Shashingo, offers a real-world benefit to playing it. It’ll help you learn more Japanese words.
Shashingo has you go around a Japanese city street to take photos of objects. But the objectives only mention the objects name in Japanese (written in either hiragana or katakana).
Also, any object you snap will be saved like a Polaroid, labelled with the Japanese and English word for the object. It becomes like a flashcard that you can refer to.
There’s also a voiceover that reads the Japanese words too, so the ability to read Japanese writing is not necessary to enjoy the game.
Shashingo should in theory help those that are learning Japanese building up their vocabulary in a practical, video game-y way. But if you just like the small fictional Japan town aesthetic for your photography game, Shashingo should be cool for that too.
There’s no release date for Shashingo yet, but it’s a cool game that we saw from Wholesome Direct 2021 stream that is worth your attention. The game has a Steam page here.