Free language game
Urchins and Ink is a free educational game that can help you exercise your Japanese comprehension in a fun way. The game lets you pick up English letters and match them with the Japanese characters. It is developed by hiccup interactive, which designed it to be a shooter-style game.
In the game, you will be helping Sumi, the main character, fight the sea urchins that have been infiltrating her home. You can choose to practice different Japanese syllabaries, like hiragana and katakana, and train with full character sets, which is perfect for training yourself for new Japanese characters.
Fun and educational
Urchins and Ink is a perfect game for people who want to practice their Japanese character reading in a fun, shooter game kind of way. All you have to do is use your mouse to aim, left click to shoot at the sea urchins, and right-click to drop the letters you’ve picked up. To move around, you can either use the arrow keys or WASD buttons.
The game has notes that the sea urchins seemingly want to attack. Your goal is to collect those notes to decipher the text and its origins while battling against the sea urchins. The sea urchins start off as invincible and shooting them will only stun them. However, once you match the right letters and characters, you can finally deal damage to them.
One downside of the game is that it only trains you with hiragana and katakana characters, and not kanji. You can also only practice with a list of vowels, so the game is still pretty limited if you really want something very challenging. Hence, the game is really only great if you want to practice basic Japanese characters. It is, however, still quite enjoyable and satisfying to play.
Basic but fun
Urchins and Ink is a great game to practice your basic hiragana and katakana reading skills and their association with some English letters or sounds. At the same time, while you’re learning, you get to aim and shoot at pesky sea urchins. Unfortunately, while the game is great for practice, it is still limited to vowels, and kanji is not included.
