Review
Sasha here! 👋
My quickest description of this game is: Boggle, Scrabble, Balatro.
I spent the better half of my Monday playing this game; I'm not the kind of person that even likes playing word games. To be fair, you don't really need to know words all too well to play this one.
Word games have a barrier to entry that this game sort of manages to get around, despite technically being a word game. Between each level you buy upgrades that modify the game's rules. Eventually, you end up playing with currency symbols, fractions, and chess pieces.
I often found myself abusing the wildcard tiles so that I wouldn't need to spell. This is why I say the game is technically a word game. The patterns you find in the tiles have to match some word in the game's dictionary, but ultimately you can just "cheese" the system by having it check the tile sequences for you. Anyone can spell nearly anything if most tiles are wildcards!
Abusing the game's system's doesn't feel bad. It sort of makes you feel smart. I wouldn't say the goal is to spell words, it's to get crazy combos! The game doesn't hold your hand when it introduces a new mechanic. The game makes sure you've noticed them but leaves it to you to figure out how they behave. You're constantly decoding the grid for patterns and making connections between what feels like disjointed game rules. I felt smart whenever I figured out how a new tile functioned. The game presents this "try it out and see what happens" attitude; experimentation is encouraged through the game's design.
Polish
The game has a very tactile feel. The buttons and UI react in a very satisfying way. Sounds are juicy and the music changes subtly during each round to help build up tension.
The characters are cute animals which serve as a light framing device for the various play styles you could take on while playing. They're not essential to the gameplay but they definitely don't add nothing. I might not have played the game if they weren't there. They make the game much more approachable.
My only critique, which may be resolved in the full release, is the pixel density of the assets. I found most of the 2D assets to be a little blurry. I suspect it had to do with my screen resolution being oddly wide. Although, I feel as if that's something that could have been resolved early on in development. The game UI even fit snuggly to my extremely wide monitor. It felt like it was made to account for the screen size yet the art was a little blurry.
Final Thoughts
The game has a free demo on steam. I played it for apparently 4.7 hours and I don't think I was even close to getting to the end.
I'd recommend this to anyone that likes short pick-up and play word-puzzle games. Be careful though, who knows if you'll be able to put it down once you've started.
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