Find Your Words is a heartwarming adventure game that pushed me to discover new means of communication with my fellow campers, and it’s made me realise how much I’ve been taking standard dialogue for granted. When you’re clicking through screens and screens of dialogue and picking responses and options that are listed on the screen, you don’t think twice. But, Find Your Words helps you to slow down and appreciate how even the most basic conversation can lead to a friendship.
At the start of the game, once you’ve picked your character, you’re dropped off at a sunny camp—appropriately called Camp Pals—by your mum. As she speaks to the camp counsellor, it’s revealed that your character is non-speaking, so usually communicates with sounds and gestures rather than words. The counsellor, Ian, is quick to accommodate this, reassuring you that other members of the camp are also non-speaking and giving you a Communication Binder, and your first few binder symbols, to help you interact with the other campers.
This binder is your key to conversation. To make it easier to navigate, it’s divided into four sections: your core phrases, places around the camp, items you pick up along the way, and your fellow campers. Using this binder, you can go around speaking to everyone and asking them to play. To trigger a conversation you need to drag the symbols you want to use into the bar at the bottom before presenting them to your conversation partner.
The more time you spend with different characters, the more symbols you collect, so at first conversation does feel limited. But that’s exactly what I think Find Your Words is trying to represent: the challenges of not being able to converse as expected and instead thinking outside the box to communicate in ways that would often be seen as unconventional.
Fortunately, everyone is more than willing to adjust to this at Camp Pals, which is certainly a feeling I appreciated, having struggled at times to use the right symbols to get the answer I wanted. The “play” symbol is the key here anyway. After all, you’re a kid at a summer camp—playing is what you’re there to do. Asking every character to play is what pushes you through Find Your Words.
(Image credit: Capybara Games)
Each of the six campers has a different “minigame” for you, like trivia, hide and seek, a treasure hunt, and most importantly for me: bird watching. They each make use of the skills you’ve learnt and the symbols you’ve picked up during the day, such as locations, and a few of the item cards you’ll discover.
Birdwatching particularly stood out to me, not only as an avid birdwatcher anyway, but because it really challenges your knowledge of the map. You’re given a pair of binoculars and told to report back to your pal and tell them what bird you saw and where you saw it. The different locations aren’t exactly signposted, apart from the obvious landmarks like the lodge, the tower, and the board, which meant I definitely mentioned the wrong location an embarrassing number of times. But this trial and error is all part of the charm, and you’re never punished for making the wrong choice which is more than enough motivation for me to try again.
As you spend more time with your fellow campers, you’ll unlock new symbols too, which does make conversation easier. In a way, this feels symbolic of the playable character coming out of their shell and wanting to be more involved with their games. The same goes for how it feels playing the game too, as I started feeling a little unsure if what I was doing and how I was using the symbols was technically correct, but by the end I was far more confident in how I could communicate.
As a result, I felt a sort of bond with my chosen camper in a way I really didn’t expect to. Find Your Words doesn’t need to be driven by dialogue to make it an emotional journey about coming out of your shell, in fact it’s quite the opposite, but the ways it pushes you to explore a world of words you might not have any experience in otherwise is what makes it a game I will think about for a while.
