An extraordinary Netflix-backed game turns sign language into gameplay
Harmonium: The Musical features a newly invented sign language so that deaf players find it sufficiently challenging, too.
I was struggling when I recently tried the upcoming vide game Harmonium: The Musical.
I wasn’t having a tough time because I was facing a brutal boss with a distressingly long health bar. I wasn’t trying to land a tricky jump on a moving platform.
I was in in Los Angeles, in a tent that was set up to showcase upcoming game releases from Netflix, and I was playing as a deaf 10-year-old girl named Melody. First, she was watching a boy on the other side of a window try to communicate with gestures about who was going to a party. Later, through her eyes, I was watching a fantastical creature communicate in a new form of sign language as it offered clues about turning parts of a statue to open a locked door.
I kept not getting it.
Where was one gesture ending and another beginning?
Sign that again, I’d ask the character.
Sorry. One more time?
Millions of people do this every day, I told myself. Millions of people have to do this. And here I was, not quite grasping the hand movements, not immediately seeing the patterns, just not understanding.
I’d seen people sign before, of course. As I was playing a slice of this extraordinary new game, however, I realized that I had never truly appreciated what it takes to communicate in sign language.
And then, slowly, I started to get it. Oh, this gesture means that, and it’s a hint that I should turn this part of a statue this way and… puzzle solved!
“It’s a learning experience,” Harmonium co-creator Matt Daigle later told me through an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter.
Harmonium: The Musical (early 2025; coming to mobile via Netflix and to Xbox Game Pass) is built around the idea of communicating in sign language—including a new sign language invented just for the game. It’s not all about translation. It’s about seeing and understanding clues, communicated by characters in the game, through a language of gestures and facial expressions. Interpreting those signs will help Melody solve myriad puzzles in Harmonium, a fantasy world where music appears in visual form.
Harmonium “wasn't just something we were making for deaf people's pleasure,” Daigle added. “We really wanted to make this, for all audiences.”
Harmonium: The Musical technically comes from The Odd Gentleman, a veteran game studio behind the Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom and a revival of the King’s Quest series. The studio has been transformed, founder Matt Korba told Game File, with the development of Harmonium, a game deeply informed by the experiences of deaf people.
“A lot of times, when stuff like this gets made in the entertainment industry, they'll slap on a consultant at the last minute, after everything's done, and say, ‘so and so approved it,’” he said.
“We had seen that go really south.”
Korba wanted something more genuine and recruited Daigle and his wife, Kay, for the project. He had been drawn to a comic strip they co-create called “That Deaf Guy.”
Soon, the studio also hired a deaf game designer and a deaf animator.
Kay, who works as a sign language interpreter and is a co-writer on Harmonium, was impressed with Korba’s approach. “This is taking us to a different level by really being part of the process,” she said.
In turn, the team is putting in a lot of work make Harmonium’s in-game sign language nuanced and effective.
“We had to not only animate hands and the arms and all of that, but the winks and the eyebrows and all of those little subtle pieces of the facial expression that means so much in the language,” Matt Daigle told me. He noted that, for a person like me, who communicates with my voice, I don’t just convey intent with my choice of words. I also use the tone of my voice. How I say something matters. “It's the same thing with sign language,” he said. “Speed and pacing changes meaning. So we had to work with all of those little details when we were animating.”
That complex work proved even more challenging after Matt Daigle proposed to Matt Korba that Harmonium also include a brand-new sign language that would be new to any ASL speakers who were playing the game.
“At first I was like, ‘No, we're doing so much already,’” Korba said. “‘I love all this stuff. But we're a small team. We're not having you invent your own sign language.’ But what convinced me was, people who know ASL, it also puts them kind of on a more level playing field.”
To understand just how this new sign language works, I had to switch up my interview with the Daigles. And now I need to switch format for this story as well.
In video form, here’s how they explained how the new Harmonium Sign Language compares to American Sign Language and what that means for players…
Harmonium is meant to convey the feeling of learning sign language, but it won’t technically teach ASL, Korba said. To make the puzzles work well for players who don’t know the language, the developers have slowed down some signs or chosen to use clues rather than specific ASL words to refer to some things in the game world.
Kay Daigle hopes that experiencing Harmonium will inspire some players to take an ASL class. She also hopes playing the game will simply create a bridge of understanding.
“A lot of times my husband will walk up to somebody and they'll … panic because they don't they don't know what to do,” she said.
Maybe if they’ve played the game, she mused, they’ll feel more comfortable and think, “I'm not going to be afraid to try to find different ways to connect with a deaf person.”
Matt Daigle is hopeful, too. Players “could be learning about what the deaf world looks like, especially if they have no understanding that deaf people are intelligent and that they have a specific way of communicating,” he said.
Item 2: Dr. Disrespect scandal update
Streamer Herschel “Guy” Beahm (aka Dr. Disrespect) acknowledged on Tuesday that he had exchanged messages “that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate” with "an individual minor back in 2017” via Twitch’s “whisper” messaging service. (He edited the word “minor” out of his statement shortly after posting, then added it back in.)
His statement follows a resurfacing of rumors this weekend that led to a report from The Verge about the reason for Beahm’s sudden split from Twitch in 2020. On Monday afternoon, Beahm was dropped by his development studio Midnight Society. On Tuesday, Bloomberg cited three sources who said Beahm was booted from Twitch because he “exchanged sexually explicit messages.
Beahm’s statement followed shortly after Bloomberg’s report. He said that “from a moral standpoint I'll absolutely take responsibility,” but said he is no “predator or pedophile.”
Beahm says he is taking an “extended vacation” from streaming on YouTube, where he has 4.7 million followers. Longtime sponsor Turtle Beach told IGN it will no longer work with him. Twitch has not commented about the latest developments.
Item 3: In brief…
👀 Acquisition-happy Atari has bought the Surgeon Simulator series from TinyBuild and will promote the franchise through its Infogrames label, which it just revived in April.
Atari also announced a fall expansion to Digital Eclipse’s acclaimed Atari 50 collection, which will add more than 30 more games. The expansion of the playable documentary will cover new topics including Atari’s rivalry with Intellivision, a brand that Atari just purchased in May.
📉 Nvidia lost $500 billion in market value over the past week, as investors slightly cooled on their enthusiasm for the graphics chip-maker seen as an engine for a generative AI boom.
Prior to the sell-off, Nvidia had briefly topped Microsoft and Apple as the world’s most highly-valued company, but the correction is by no means dire, ABC reports, noting that Nvidia announced $26 billion in quarterly earnings last month.
Nvidia bounced back on Tuesday to recover some of that lost value and made a slight gain on Wednesday.
💰 K-ID, a start-up focused on ensuring video games are compliant around the world with regulations around child safety, has raised $45 million in a new round of funding.
That’s a rare show of investor enthusiasm during the current tepid climate around financing new gaming operations.
⚔️ From Software has updated Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion to make its opening hours easier, VGC reports.
From’s games may be celebrated for their difficulty, but players were giving the expansion mixed reviews over how punishing it is (critics, for their part, widely praised it.)
Harmonium sounds interesting thanks for covering it!
Wonderful feature on Harmonium!