Forest of Deceit: Why Localisation Matters When Everyone is Lying
Summary
- How social deduction games function through clarity.
- We improved clarity by adding new languages.
- Customize your localization at a granular level.
The last thing you want in a game about lying is to look suspicious just because you didn’t understand what exactly was happening.
Forest of Deceit, the social deduction party game created by Ghost Camp and Thomas Mackinnon (The Corridor, It Takes a War) and narrated by Sylvester McCoy (“Doctor Who”, “The Hobbit”) is now localised in six new languages!
When we released Forest of Deceit earlier in the year, one of the most common questions we received was, “Will the game eventually be localised?” This is a feature we really wanted to include, and we’re so happy to be able to say the update is out now.
The new languages included in the update are:
- German
- French
- Spanish
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Simplified Chinese
- Italian
Forest of Deceit is a party game built entirely around conversation and language. In the game, you play with four to eight players (either locally or online via screen share, using your mobile web browsers to control the game) and are trying to guess who amongst the group are “Innocents” or “Traitors”. The fun of the game comes from talking to each other, and so making sure there is as little friction as possible between players understanding the game and being able to communicate their position in it to one another is really important.
For example, if you don’t understand what a specific button does or exactly what your choice in the game means, it could mean you act in a way that leads to you looking far more suspicious than you intended. It’s never fun when you lose due to a misunderstanding rather than your own mistake, so having the game be playable natively in other languages and working closely with translators to make sure Forest of Deceit has been translated accurately was of high importance for us. Making sure the difference is noted between getting lost in the woods randomly and getting forcibly ousted by your friends is quite important, for instance.
Another element of why localising the game was a priority on our end was because for many players, this is the type of game they will want to play with their friends and family. The more people playing the game, the higher the chance someone playing won’t speak English. It’s a bit like having a vegetarian option at a restaurant – it doesn’t just make the restaurant accessible for vegetarians, but also entire groups of people that happen to have a vegetarian in them can enjoy eating together. There might be a group where most people speak English, but they have a friend who only speaks Italian. Not only could they now play the entire game in Italian, if desired they could even set just the main game to English and have only that specific person’s mobile controller in Italian. The game is now much more accessible for that group even though the language barrier only affected one person!
Gaming is better when everyone can play. It costs money and takes time, but we believe localising games to as many languages as possible (especially ones as word-based as ours) is worth it, and makes the space better for everyone.
Forest of Deceit’s localisation update is out now on XBOX Series X|S, XBOX One, and Windows PC. The game supports XBOX Play Anywhere.
