Latinorum

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made

Back when I was in high school, the oral exams for Spanish class terrified the (non-Hispanic/Latine) student population. We had to take a historical figure from a Spanish-speaking country and give a talk about them to the teacher and the rest of the class, a former Jesuit and very strict, He would grill us on our technique and pronunciation mistakes mid-presentation, with a lot of scathing comments directed towards the hordes of people who did Simón Bolívar or Gabriel García Márquez (although all he had to say to the guy who did Augusto Pinochet was “Oh! Very controversial” and a B+ grade).

In Latinorum, you’re also a student experiencing dread over language exams, although you’re Italian, it’s the 1980s, it’s ‘merely’ a written exam, and the good thing about written exams is that you can steal the test materials and cheat from them.

The game is much more friendly than I was expecting from it being a Commodore 64 game made over forty years ago (the C64 was quite a bit before my generation). The limited two-word parser, small scope, interactable objects being highlighted, and lack of death/no-win states means it’s approachable. I was never in any doubt about what to do despite an abundance of red herring items to pick up (and limited inventory space). Some of the writing was funny, I was reminded of all the dread my classmates and I had to go through preparing for the exams. A good way to spend fifteen to twenty-five minutes.