Characters with pinyin underneath — start before you can read.
In most languages, a new word is a new arrangement of letters you already know. In Chinese, a new word can be a character you have never seen, with no reliable way to guess its sound. This is the real difficulty — not grammar, which is unusually simple, but the sheer number of shapes to recognise.
Every Chinese word in this game shows the character with pinyin underneath: 水 with shuǐ beside it. You can play from the pinyin on day one and let the characters become familiar at their own pace.
Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral one, and they are part of the word, not decoration. The same syllable said with a different pitch is a different word entirely. This is the single thing most beginners underestimate, and it is the reason a learner can pronounce every consonant correctly and still not be understood.
The tone marks above the pinyin vowels — shuǐ, miànbāo, péngyou — are telling you the pitch shape. Read them out loud with the movement, not flat. A game can show you the marks; only speaking and listening will make them automatic.
No verb conjugation. No plural endings. No grammatical gender. No cases. "我吃" is I eat, and it stays that shape whether you mean yesterday, today or tomorrow — time comes from a separate word, not from changing the verb. After German or Spanish, this feels almost too generous.
What replaces it is word order and small function words, which is exactly what an example sentence shows you and a word list cannot.
This game uses simplified characters, the standard in mainland China and Singapore. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Many characters are identical in both systems, and someone who learns one can usually read a good deal of the other with a little effort.
Recognising a character is far easier than recalling it. Once a set feels comfortable, change the language you speak so Chinese becomes the starting point — that direction is much harder and much closer to what real use demands.