I must have needed to wind down this weekend. Either that, or my brain needed a rest. Whatever the reason, I ended up hopping on the Steam platform and indulging in a bit of polyglot PC gaming!

Now, I’m by no means a hardcore gamer. Despite early promise as a proud Commodore 64 technokid, and some dalliance with the groundbreaking Quake in the 90s, I managed to avoid the console era almost completely. Only in recent years did I start to make up lost ground, milking my Oculus Quest 2 to the max for all its gaming / language crossover fun.

Steam has been around for years already, of course. Oddly, PC gaming had never been a huge draw for me, beyond a brief addition to Sid Meier’s Civilisation at university. Maybe I associate the computer too much with work and study to really enjoy it. But when I heard friends cooing over Steam’s ample catalogue of free-to-play games, I thought it was worth a nose. We all need a bit of distraction now and again, right?

They weren’t wrong. After installing the Steam app, you have access to a bunch of older titles for absolutely nothing. But not only that…

You can search the Steam library by language.

Multilingual gaming!

Instant polyglot satisfaction. And it’s not just the usual roll call of tongues, either. There are some more off-the-beaten-track entries on the language list, including Greek, Polish and Ukrainian. Of course, most of these options just change the interface text and written dialogue, but some include multi-language spoken audio too.

Perhaps it was the old Civ 2 addiction stirring in me again, but I found myself spending far too much time on the Noughties Sim classic Fall Out Shelter. If it hadn’t been for the fact I’d switched it to German, I might feel just a little bit guilty with all that procrastinating.

Only a tiny bit, though.

Polyglot gaming – a screenshot from Fallout Shelter in German