Inside Palmier Island, The Language-Learning Game Built For Gen Z

Palmier Island, the flagship game for indie video game studio Biscuit Games, starts off with a predicament. A small island’s economy has collapsed, an uncle has vanished, and a million-dollar debt has inconveniently landed on the shoulders of a new arrival who barely speaks the local language.

The islanders are friendly enough, but they communicate only in French. Before a door can be opened or a favor earned, understanding must happen through ordinary moments: a shop interaction, a neighbor’s request, a message on a dusty in-game phone.

This is where the game, led by the studio’s 24-year-old founder Meisa Chen, diverges from what language apps tend to offer. The world in Palmier Island simply moves, and learning occurs because it must.

Meisa Chen’s Vision Of Worldbuilding

Palmier Island takes language as a driving factor in how users interact with the world around them. French appears through conversations, scenery, and unfolding events, creating a setting in which understanding becomes a natural byproduct of participation. Storylines move forward only as players understand the meaning behind French words, making learning a key part of the narrative.

That structure becomes clearest in the tasks the island demands. Repairing an uncle’s deteriorating house, contributing to the local economy, or supporting villagers through their daily concerns doubles as a more natural way to absorb vocabulary. Even moments with no immediate narrative payoff, like attempting to enter a locked home or deciphering a neighbor’s request, turn the language into part of the island’s internal logic.

The game’s founder and main creator, Meisa Chen, believes this is what learning should feel like: immersing in a world first, learning as the quiet outcome. She rejects the conventions of most edtech platforms and believes factors like narrative storytelling can turn learning into a lived-in experience, explaining that “people see Palmier Island more as a game than an educational app, because it’s too fun to feel educational.”

For Chen, this philosophy defines the experience she calls “a fully immersive experience — a vacation in your pocket,” where storytelling stakes guide players toward French without ever announcing that teaching is the goal.

Chattle: The System Driving Palmier Island’s Conversational Play

The game’s educational side is reflected in practice through its conversational system, which Chen calls “chattle,” a system that turns dialogue into a constant puzzle that can only be advanced by picking up on more French vocabulary. Players capture word chips, guess their meaning, and feed those interpretations back into the exchange to move the story forward. As Chen puts it, “every back-and-forth is a puzzle — like a battle where your ‘moves’ are vocabulary.”

That mechanic becomes more context-specific the more one interacts with the island’s cast, with each new character offering a distinct register of speech and personality. Naisgai, the directionless Gen Z islander, provides early guidance in a tone shaped by burnout and dry humor. Alphie, the slang-heavy Gen Alpha kid, brings a faster, internet-saturated cadence that reflects his age and online influences, while Bumer, the bad-tempered boomer widower, acts grumpy but has a secret tenderness to him that comes out the more one interacts with him.

Because these exchanges rely purely on deduction, learning happens in the same organic way conversations unfold in an unfamiliar place: through trial and error. The aim is to turn those mistakes into memorable anchors. Even in minigames like a shop sequence where players must read through French labels to pick out what they’re getting, progress depends on applying context to real narrative needs, mirroring the feeling of finding one’s way through a foreign place.

The Founder’s Experience Of Learning Through Practice, Not Theory

Chen’s approach began forming during her month in Milan, where learning emerged purely from constantly interacting with local people who spoke the language fluently. Even with only a little language education behind her, Chen slowly found herself absorbing Italian because everyday encounters demanded it, recalling that “by the end of the month, I had a decent grasp of Italian — I thought: how did this happen?”

That realization led to her belief that language settles in most effectively when it grows out of actual experiences, and not merely through structured lessons.

It was that feeling she wanted to reflect with Palmier Island: the thrill of needing to understand to get through the day-to-day.

Intention At The Core Of Biscuit Games

Palmier Island is the main project of Biscuit Games, a young studio shaped around the idea of “nutritious” play, one where players get involved in learning language the more they play, with the teaching moments never feeling like a didactic design. As she explains, “our games are nutritious, they’re super fun, and you learn without realizing it.”

Chen shares how the project is especially making a mark on its Gen Z audience, who see themselves and their generation reflected in characters like Alphie and Naisgai and respond to stories that feel based on their own humor and regular worries. She recognized this connection early, watching teens send fan mail about characters and linger in playtests long past the scheduled sessions. Their reactions confirmed that Palmier Island can function as a real game first, not an educational product disguised as one.

A significant part of why Chen believes this dynamic works is the studio’s commitment to human craft. Rejecting the advent of AI-driven generative tools to replace creative activities, Chen hand-illustrated the entire demo, believing a story’s emotional resonance can only really resonate if every element has conscious intention behind it. She also contracts artists primarily from her home country of Canada for further development, choosing to support creative communities she trusts.

For Chen, worldbuilding depends on the care and perspective of real people, and she aims to continue leading Biscuit Games with that mindset.

Making Education Fun Again

With plans to launch the finished product in early 2026, the free demo of Palmier Island is already available on the App Store, Play Store, and Steam, and Biscuit Games is already planning future titles in Japanese and Italian, each set in different genres and following their own narrative structures.

All throughout, the throughline remains the same: language as something absorbed by living inside a world players can explore. For Meisa Chen, the goal is not to teach, but to build places where understanding becomes a side effect of belonging.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.