Owlboy's 13 languages
Steam lists 13 languages, all with full audio: English, Japanese, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Norwegian.
Owlboy supports 13 languages, and Steam lists all of them with full audio support. That is unusual for an indie platformer of its size, and it is one of the reasons the game still finds players outside English-speaking markets.
The table below comes from the Steam store's supported languages field for app 115800.
The full list
| Language | Interface | Audio |
|---|---|---|
| English | Yes | Yes |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes |
| French | Yes | Yes |
| Italian | Yes | Yes |
| German | Yes | Yes |
| Spanish (Spain) | Yes | Yes |
| Korean | Yes | Yes |
| Polish | Yes | Yes |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | Yes | Yes |
| Russian | Yes | Yes |
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes |
| Norwegian | Yes | Yes |
Thirteen languages, all with voice work. The store marks them with an asterisk and a note that the asterisk means full audio, and every entry carries it.
Chinese support
Both Simplified and Traditional Chinese are supported, with audio. That is worth stating plainly because it is a common search question, and because the 2022 patch specifically improved the readability of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts.
If you are playing in Chinese, the text is rendered with the updated font set from the 2022 build. The anniversary update did not change localisation.
Norwegian
Norwegian is the developer's own language, and it was added in December 2017 after a public beta on Steam. The game's news feed documents the beta and the release, which makes it the only language with a public launch note.
That detail is a nice piece of the game's history: D-Pad Studio is Norwegian, and the localisation was finished after the initial release rather than at launch.
What is not supported
There is no Arabic, Turkish, Ukrainian, Thai or Vietnamese. If your language is not on the list, the game will run with English text and audio.
The store page does not list partial support: every language in the table has the same audio coverage. There is no "interface only" tier.
Does language affect gameplay?
Not mechanically. The game's puzzles are visual, and the dialogue is story. The one practical difference is text speed and font size: the 2022 patch improved CJK fonts, and the anniversary update's fast-forward makes reading long scenes optional.
Speedrunners sometimes switch the language to Traditional Chinese because the text boxes advance faster in that localisation. That is a route optimisation, not a feature, and it is documented in the community any% guide.
How the localisation works
Owlboy's dialogue is text boxes with voice-like sounds rather than full voice acting in the conventional sense. The store's "full audio" note means the localised audio layer is present for every listed language, not that there is a dub of every line.
The practical result is that switching language changes both the text and the vocalisations. It does not change the story, the puzzles or the achievements. You can switch at any time from the options menu.
The 2022 patch improved the font rendering for Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Korean. Before that, the CJK text was harder to read at the game's pixel scale. If you are playing in one of those languages, the 2022 build or later is the one to use.
Which language should you pick
If you are learning a language, Owlboy is a reasonable choice: the text is short, the scenes are visual, and the story is easy to follow. The dialogue is also repetitive in a useful way, because characters repeat each other's names and refer to the same events.
If you are playing for the story, play in the language you read fastest. The game's emotional beats are in the text, and the pixel art carries the rest.
If you are speedrunning, the community has opinions. The any% guide notes that runs use the Traditional Chinese language option because the text boxes advance faster. That is a route detail, not a recommendation for normal play.
Text, audio and subtitles
There are no separate subtitle settings; the dialogue is the text box. The store's language field covers both interface and audio, and there is no partial tier.
That means you cannot, for example, play with English audio and Chinese text. The localisation is a single package per language.
Thirteen languages in context
Thirteen localisations is a lot for a game of Owlboy's size. The 2016 release shipped with eleven, Norwegian was added in December 2017, and the list has been stable since. For comparison, many indie platformers of the same era shipped with five or six.
The breadth is part of why the game still has an audience outside English-speaking countries. It is also why the anniversary update's text changes are limited: re-localising a patch for thirteen languages is expensive, which is one reason the update is mostly mechanical.
Language and the anniversary update
The update did not add a language and did not change existing localisations. The new menu text for the four toggles is the exception; it had to be translated for every supported language, because the toggles are new strings.
If you are playing in a non-English language and the toggle names look odd, that is the newest text in the game. The story text is unchanged from the 2022 build.
A note on the table
The table lists every language Steam marks as supported. The store page marks all 13 with an asterisk and defines the asterisk as full audio support, which is why the audio column is uniformly "Yes". There is no separate subtitle-only tier in the store data.
_Checked 2026-11-03 against the Steam store's supported languages field for app 115800 and the 2022-04-28 patch notes._