Kana Quest is a great puzzle game that just so happens to also teach you Japanese

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Growing up, I played a lot of educational games on the Apple IIe, like Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? The games that actually taught me things were also the ones that were fun to play, learning how a particular subject aligned with how you needed to think about getting better at the game. The Carmen Sandiego games were particularly good at this: improving meant teaching yourself more about the locations or places in time where the thief could have fled to in order to better discern the clues.

In a...

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