When you switch languages, Torizon Telecom rebuilds itself
SkagoGames' shooter renders walls, guns, and bullets as words
In Torizon Telecom, the walls say Wall. The floors say Floor. The trees say tree, the bullets are strings of characters, and the whole run-and-gun world—a place literally named Telecom—is typeset rather than textured. What surfaced it promises "everything is text, even the bullets," and the studio SkagoGames means it structurally: change the game's language settings and the entire world re-renders in that language. Localization, usually the least visible labor in games, becomes the level design.
Underneath the conceit, it's a classicist shooter in the Doom and Quake line—pistols, shotguns, rocket jumps, akimbo everything—planned for Steam in 2026, with a level editor and Workshop support, and a demo that showed at BIC 2026 in Busan. The story teases the obvious metaphysical itch: if everything is text, does anything exist outside Telecom, and what, exactly, are you written in?
Killscreen's canonical text on this is still Device 6, where "the written word is your map, as well as your narrator." A decade later, the word is also the wall, the gun, and the thing bleeding out on the floor.
Killscreen has been reading games as text—sometimes literally—since 2010. The free newsletter delivers the argument three times a week.
