Game of the Week: Learning to listen in Mediterranea Inferno

Are you a good listener? It's a skill, maybe an art, that I wish I could get better at. I nod along and ask appropriate questions as much as I can, but I'm often lost in my own head, listening to my own internal monologue - listening, kind of, but with an eye peering out the window.

This week we've had two games that are basically about listening, though. Chants of Sennaar, a game which I still cannot spell properly even after reviewing it, is ostensibly a game about cracking a series of written languages, working out what a variety of glyphs mean as you work your way up the Tower of Babel. But actually, it's about listening. I cracked those glyphs by listening to the people I met, even though I was reading what they were saying rather than paying attention to the audio. Similarly, I listened, in a sense, to the words that were carved on the walls or scrawled in the in-game notebook. I'm a better reader than a listener, but this kind of reading felt like it was teaching me useful stuff about paying attention that I could maybe bring across to my next real-world conversation.

Our Game of the Week, though, is Mediterranea Inferno, another tough spell if, like me, you absolutely lose it whenever unexpected double letters turn up in a word. Matt Wales gave this five stars in his beautiful, searching review. It's a visual novel, which means it's about reading, but again, it's really about listening.