New Review is Live!
Our fourth Metacritic-affiliated review is here! We got a review from Matt Sainsbury (Editor-in-Chief of Digitally Downloaded), scoring Shujinkou a maximum score of 5 stars—only the second one the publication has given this year!
Please give the full review a read here:
https://www.digitallydownloaded.net/2025/02/review-shujinkou-sony-playstation-5
Excerpts from the Review
- "(...) Of all the many “language learning” games I’ve played, Shujinkou is the one that “gets it” the best. And that’s precisely because it eases you into Japanese using it in context."
- "Because the game is there to teach, it actually has more of a narrative than most dungeon crawlers. Oh, and it’ll take you 70 or so hours to play through. This thing has substance, is the point."
- "The induction (...from too many tutorials at once) is likely to be at least mildly confusing to most players until they have taken the time to immerse themselves within the game itself and mess around with the systems personally." - Oops! We'll see what we can do about that! - Julian
- "It’s a testament to the quality of the game that it holds up perfectly well if you don’t want to be educated by it at all, but if you do take it seriously, it’ll actually progress you pretty far down the path to proficiency all by itself."
Review Conclusion
"Shujinkou is a genuinely worthwhile language tool wrapped up in a genuinely worthwhile indie Etrian Odyssey-style dungeon crawler. It’s an inspired, intelligent idea and I hope people give it a chance despite being as indie as they come. On sheer ambition and creative energy, I would be hard-pressed to point to anything I have ever played that’s more impressive than this."