Should have specified that—“foreign” to the intended audience of the work. A game entirely in Spanish meant for an audience of L1 Spanish-speakers wouldn’t count, but a bunch of English in it would. A game entirely in Esperanto, though, probably would count, since it’s almost certainly not meant for an audience of L1 Esperanto-speakers.
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Not to belabour the point, but I’m part of that intended audience (I hope?) and it’s foreign to me? I think what you mean is “other than English” 
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Well, if the game is written almost entirely in English, then presumably the target audience is specifically (a subset of) people who speak English, right?
I don’t think we have any entries in this IFComp that don’t use English as their core language, but e.g. the French ECTOCOMP entries have Francophones as their target audience, and so on? That’s what I’m trying to specify. If your target audience is Francophones, then using French isn’t “foreign”; if your target audience is Anglophones, then it is, even though many people speak both English and French.
Maybe “a language that you aren’t implicitly expecting your audience to be fluent with in order to play at all” would be a more accurate descriptor.
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Has there been an official determination of the special prize winner? Or is more data needed?
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One more bit of data is needed!
Can someone confirm for me how Quisborne makes use of a foreign language? (I’d really hoped that I would be able to play all the games during the comp so I could make these determinations myself, but it didn’t end up happening.)
Depending on the answer to this question, it looks like the winner is going to be either Prince Quisborne or Codename Obscura!
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Puzzle spoiler alert for anyone still planning to play the game…
Quisborne travels to a far land to obtain a very important item from a wild people who have it. The player has to realize that they need to communicate with the wild people, who are speaking to them in the Tuttarumbish language. The puzzle is to go back to an outpost in the same region, ask around and find someone who knows the Tuttarumbish. Quisborne needs to bring this individual with him back to the wild folk village as an interpreter in order to ask the important questions.
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I can confirm this. It is deep into the game, but it is the part that I play tested. The foreign language includes expressions like:
- “Phunj hummagungfoj Tuttarumbish. Pulapyuk zim chin fung!”
- “Phunj denchurkzib oom. Ung-hoo?”
- “Klogtog fizzibet mencheewibbin wog-wog!”
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Argh, it looks like the forum ate my reply. But what it said was: even if it’s not a full-fledged conlang, a puzzle about getting a translator to decipher some unintelligible dialogue counts for me!
Which means the winner of this special prize is Prince Quisborne!
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