Questionaut

Questionaut is a strange phenomenon: an educational game that people played voluntarily. Amanita Design made it for the British BBC as part of its educational section Bitesize, and the result looks like a full-fledged adventure, not like a drill program with pictures.

The player travels by balloon between floating islands, and on each one a character is waiting with questions from a single school subject — maths, English, or science. Answers aren't typed into a form; they're solved by manipulating the environment, so even grammar practice looks like a puzzle. You fly between the islands, and the world has the same handmade aesthetic as Samorost.

What's worth noticing is how little the game feels like school. There's no score anywhere, no messages about progress — a wrong answer just sends you back to the start of the question. That it's a commission for public-service television only becomes clear from the subject matter — and that's also why it's still cited today as an example of how an educational game can be done well.

Why play it: Proof that a learning game doesn't have to be a compromise — and one of the few commissioned works you'd play for fun.