Grammarian Ltd

Genre: Educational

Players: 1

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Review:

Grammarian Ltd is a family-friendly Educational game released on PC in 2022 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game, set in possibly the mildest form of dystopia I have ever seen, takes place in a future where government overreach has made grammatical errors a crime, and employs agencies to seek out such linguistical errors and mete out semantic justice. You play as a new hire to one such organization, accidentally put in an auditor’s role when applying to be a janitor, and trying to keep your job performance up without running out of energy or time or falling into bureaucratic despair.

In many ways, Grammarian Ltd has a lot in common with beloved PC classic Papers, Please. You have the dystopian government that the protagonist doesn’t love but must work for, papers submitted for your review represent real people whose lives your job is affecting, but you must also be concerned with your own quality of life, with your job performance directly affecting your earnings, which in turn affects your ability to pay rent, keep yourself relatively happy and healthy, and possibly have some hope for upward mobility.

Having said all that, Grammarian Ltd is a family-friendly game, and so unlike Papers, Please, the player is distanced from the lives of those whose writing they’re reviewing, and you’re not really made to feel the ethical dilemma of being a cog in a machine that grinds up human lives, as Papers, Please does. Your character hates this government, but seems more concerned about not getting caught after the hiring mix-up, with the game’s plot focusing more on a nosy co-worker and a suspiciously enthusiastic new janitor than the writers of the documents you’re checking.

As such, when it comes time to correcting paperwork, there doesn’t seem any real motivation to lie or fudge things a little to help out someone who’s life is in your hands. Rather, this really is mainly about checking and correcting grammar. Each day within the game has players focus on a different type of word (proper noun, interrogative pronoun, etc.), with your goal for papers you review either being to find every instance of such a word in the document, or checking all of that type of word to ensure it is the correct one.

Players will move a cursor to find the words in question, with the game deducting stamina when you choose a word that’s the wrong type, and with a clock ticking away as you look over the paperwork. Finish early, and you’ll have longer to relax at home, improving your stamina. Be accurate in your review of these papers and you’ll earn more money and improve your happiness (which can affect your stamina). Money can be spent on items to improve your apartment (thus giving regular boosts to happiness and stamina), consumable items to give you an emergency boost, and expanding the game’s soundtrack, as well as eventually moving you to a better apartment overall.

In addition to your daily review of paperwork, you’ll also occasionally find yourself up for promotion, involving a competitive proofread-off with an AI-controlled coworker fighting you for the position. This makes for a nice change of pace as you look through documents to try to find things before they do.

The presentation here is pretty good overall, featuring nicely-drawn cartoony 2D characters and clean, easy-to-read text. And this is backed by a pretty excellent soundtrack with some nice, laid-back lo-fi tunes that fit the game’s relaxed tone very well. The presentation is overall pretty good here.

So now to get down to it… is Grammarian Ltd actually fun? Well… yeah, if you’re the sort of person who appreciates good grammar. No, I didn’t mean that as a joke. I know there’s a tendency for players to see most “Edutainment” games as more “Education” than “Entertainment”, and I don’t think those players will have their minds changed by Grammarian Ltd, but this is nevertheless one of the better examples of a game that succeeds in delivering both education and entertainment.

Sure, not everyone is going to get a thrill out of correcting documents to have proper English, but for others it’s a fun puzzle, and this game does a good job appealing to that latter group. What’s more, the time management and life Simulation elements that surround the grammar give some nice motivation to work faster and more accurately, and the story, while somewhat silly, is nevertheless interesting. And while this may not be important to everyone, it is worth noting that the educational part of this game is fairly decent too, though more as a way to brush up on different elements of the English language rather than teaching it for the first time. Overall, Grammarian Ltd succeeds at what it sets out to do, and the result is one of the best Educational games on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Grammarian Ltd is a family-friendly Educational game set in a dystopian future where grammatical errors are a crime, and you play a new hire in an organization reviewing documents to look for such crimes. While this is indeed a game about checking grammar, it nevertheless does a good job making this interesting, resulting in a solid game for players who see correcting grammar as a fun puzzle, and a decent educational title for players looking to brush up on their English skills.

Grade: B

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