Speaking Simulator is the type of game that is difficult to describe without sounding like a madman. See, it’s a game where you manipulate a robot’s tongue and mouth in order to hold conversations so that you can blend into human society. Sure, messing up might make one of your eyes pop out, or make smoke blast out the back of your head, but socializing is tough. It’s this strange but wonderful concept that makes Speaking Simulator such a delightful game to play, as there’s really nothing else quite like it.
When I spoke to Jed and Jordan of Affable Games, the men behind this delightful fever dream, they cited QWOP as a bit of an inspiration for Speaking Simulator, and it certainly shows. You play as a robot who’s trying to fit into human society, which is a simple concept. It’s the micromanagement of every part of your face that makes things complicated, as you’ll have to manually adjust your lips, tongue, and as the game goes on, your eyes and expressiveness. It’s chaos at its finest, especially as when you fail, as you literally start falling apart in an incredibly comical way.
The controls are deceptively simple, once you get the hang of them. You use the WASD keys to manipulate your tongue, and the mouse to position your mouth/lips. Speaking Simulator gives you plenty of direction to make things a bit easier to follow, as you’ll have to use your mouth and tongue to spell out all sorts of ridiculous sentences. From a job interview to a eulogy, Speaking Simulator is planned to put you into the weirdest scenarios possible. You’ll be talking about drinking oil and other human things one minute, then bursting out in binary sequences the next. If you can’t tell, the writing in the build I played was sharp and entertaining, complemented well by the nonsensical “simlish” voice-acting that accompanied each line.
As someone who has never been a particularly social guy, there’s a strange sense of familiarity in Speaking Simulator. I mean, obviously myself and others like me don’t shoot sparks out of our eyes or accidentally knock out our teeth when in a conversation, but the amount of different thought processes that Speaking Simulator has you juggle feels relatable, at it’s easy to draw parallels between controlling ten different parts of your face and trying to keep a conversation interesting without totally blowing it, all the while overthinking the entire process. Regardless, I’m looking forward to Speaking Simulator, and I can’t wait for it to launch later this year.
