What the LINGO? is a fangame of a quirky piece of media known as LINGO (the game, not the show) released for its third birthday that aims to bring mechanics from the original in an abstract 2D environment and focus all about the puzzles! If you've played LINGO before, you might have been like me and felt like the word puzzles were what you enjoyed the most from the game and weren't particularly fond of the 3D non-Euclidean navigation. If that is you, then I have good news - this game is made for people just like you! (No offence to the original of course.)

Controls & Shortcuts

Due to not having yet figured out a proper spot for them, you can see all of the controls and hotkeys for the game here!

Level Hub: Use WASD or the Arrow Keys to move around! (Alternatively, you can change to only mouse controls in the settings and move the map towards a direction by holding the Right Mouse Button.) Press Space/Enter when hovering over a level or click it with your mouse to enter it. Hold Escape to quit the game if you're in fullscreen mode.

Levels: Left Click on panels to select them. Alternatively, use A or D/Left or Right Arrow Keys to put your panel cursor on the right panel and press Space/Enter to select it. Right Click on panels to unsolve them or press backspace on solved panels when the panel cursor hovers over them. Click the arrows on the side or Press A or D/Left or Right Arrow Keys while holding Shift to switch sets! Press Escape to exit a level quickly.

What is this game about?

What the LINGO? features a bunch of different ways you can modify words to get other, sometimes pretty obscure words and teaches them to you by letting you solve puzzles. Rule discovery plays a huge role in this game and is one of my personal favourite aspects in any puzzle game, so I've made this game beginner friendly. So if you haven't played LINGO, don't worry, this game is also suited for you to learn the mechanics at your own pace as well!

It also delves into some alternate interpretations of mechanics made by other people in the community (alongside said mechanics often being brought into the game, credits to everyone provided in game) and even of base mechanics from the original game, so there's something for the veterans out there as well!

In-game progression & complexity

The puzzles can also get hard in little to no time. That being said, you don't have to do every main puzzle in order to beat this game. Progression is designed so that even if you can't fully complete a level, beating the majority of it will let you go forward or unlock other levels that had certain prerequisites. Alongside that, I've taken the liberty to write hints for all the levels whenever you're stuck to help you out with learning rules, getting an idea for an answer tied to the puzzle you're stuck on or giving you ideas for how to solve puzzles more efficiently! You also get the liberty of picking your own path of mechanics, so when one mechanic is too convoluted for you to understand, you can always switch to something else and return to it later once you have a fresh mindset.

Development Progress

We've released the Christmas Update on December 25th - just in time for the holidays! Our next plans are to explore 3 new mechanics that I and one of my beta testers, Evelyn, have worked on out of fun. Be on the lookout for the first spin-off, "What the LINGO? - Glitchland" (WIP Title) during February!

As for work on the main game, don't worry - we're not abandoning this just yet! The full release of WtL? is planned to happen somewhere between the end of Q2 2025 and start of Q3 2025. Though like with any game project, we can't be fully certain about the exact date. What we CAN promise is that it's definitely coming!

Development Team & Other

What the LINGO? is developed by a mere duo of a team - me as the Programmer, Artist and main Puzzle Designer and SeemsLegitHuh as the OST Composer and Puzzle Designer. Both of us are still studying since the time of writing this and generally enjoy working on the elements of this game for fun and don't really expect any money in return. That being said, any and all donations sent to us so we can dabble in future projects of ours are well appreciated!

D.B.Plasma's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dbplasma.bsky.social

SeemsLegitHuh's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/seemslegithuh.bsky.social

If you want to get in contact with me and/or SeemsLegitHuh, you can do so in the official LINGO discord server where we have a post in #friends-of-lingo! Here's a link if you're interested: https://discord.gg/lingothegame

WtL? Soundtrack

You can check out the soundtrack in these 2 links:

YouTube Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZuEHmftdoKOrCI4hlLkjwyS9j-ITigVm

MP3 Renders: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p0GSkKQnFuIBl45xnSOrvGAHMK1fHkXb