A hilarious mistranslation accidentally added a curse word to an indie game’s title, but it turns out it didn’t hurt sales whatsoever. In fact, the opposite is true, as it actually helped drive interest.
Italian indie devs at Fix-a-Bug spent over three years working on their latest project. Known in English as The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles, it blends turn-based combat with real-time dungeon crawling in an endlessly replayable adventure.
The game officially launched on October 23, 2025, but the road to release certainly didn’t go as planned.
Looking to capture as wide an audience as possible, devs sought to roll the game out in a number of languages, one being Japanese. However, what they couldn’t have predicted was how the game’s title would lead to issues in the foreign dialect.
Japanese translation leads to curse word in indie game title
A few months prior to launch, The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles went viral in Japan, but not for the reasons you might expect. “What happened was completely unintentional,” as a dev said on Reddit.
At the time, the game’s Steam page was unofficially translated to Japanese by the developers to get the ball rolling before their publisher handled a more precise, official translation.
As explained by the team, instead of translating ‘crazy’ into the likes of ‘strange’ or ‘quirky’, the Japanese translation landed on ‘Kuso Dungeon,’ which directly translates to ‘Crap Dungeon’ or ‘Sh*tty Dungeon.’
Devs naturally panicked and “immediately changed the title” upon being made aware, “but by then, the ‘damage’ was done,” they joked. Various Japanese gaming accounts on social media caught wind of the hilarious mistake before a few local outlets picked up the news as well.
Before long, the incident actually proved to benefit the team. 2,000 additional wishlists piled up on Steam in light of the amusing mistranslation.
Battlefield Redsec launches with ‘Mostly Negative’ reviews on Steam