Planet of Lana 2: Why They Decided For Unintelligible Language

One of the interesting bits from Planet of Lana 2: Children of the Leaf is that the characters speak their own language that the player is unable to understand, and after early testing that feature created a major issue. Speaking with us on the TheoryUnlocked podcast, Klas Martin Eriksson, the co-game director, revealed that in early testing that feature was complained about by some external testers.

“Some people… just got so hung up on the no dialogue, no subtitles, unintelligible dialogue, that they could not get past it in testing and pay attention to what was happening on screen. They went into the settings, ‘where are the subtitles, can I turn them on?’ and we noticed that uncertainty.”

Klas went on to say that for the people who felt that way, it genuinely ruined the experience for them in testing, not knowing if it was intentional. However, they were able to find one small teak that basically removed any complaints.

“We added two sentences at the beginning of the game. This is an intentional creative choice. We want you to interpret the story, and that feedback [complaining about the lack of dialogue] completely disappeared. Let's see where a simple fix might take us and that did the job.”

Klas would also explain why the decision to go with the unintelligible dialogue was made in the first place.

“The decision was primarily for gameplay reasons. The relationship between Lana and Mui is the core of the gameplay. We were enamored with games that had no dialogue at all and that was the original hypothesis. But we had this collaboration with Mui, and we wanted that to be the emotional kindling of the story. We felt we needed something there, we tried whistles and stuff like that, but it made no sense.

“We need them to talk to each other, even if we cannot understand what they are saying. As we were writing and the story was coming together, we decided to lean into that. The foundation was always to try a visual story, but this pretend language was to add a little bit more flavor, a window into this planet.”

How do you feel about dialogue in games, do you want it in your native language, gibberish, nothing at all or something in between? Let us know in the comments and check out our Planet of Lana 2 review.