Cursed Words: The Word Game That Isn't

Имба. Щедрое демо с контентом на 20+ часов. В этой игре не надо знать много английских слов, большую часть времени вы будете просто выстраивать длинную змейку из wild-card тайлов и высокочастотных сочетаний букв. К слову, словарь игры можно переключить на немецкий, французский и испанский, но интерфейс остаётся английским. По-инди-йски глубоко, но приятно смотрится и ощущается. Разве что музыка и эмбиент надоедливые. Процент очень фановых каток довольно большой, всегда можно выбрать вызов по душе. Во время игры открываешь для себя много новых удивительных взаимодействий. Мне нравится местная мета, она не грузит мозг вне игры. Но всё же хотелось бы, чтобы разработчики в будущем дали больше возможностей для настройки игры под себя. Imba. A generous demo with 20+ hours of content. You don’t need a huge English vocabulary for this one; most of the time you’ll just be building long snakes out of wild-card tiles and high-frequency letter combinations. By the way, you can switch the in-game dictionary to German, French, or Spanish, though the UI remains in English. Indie-level depth, but it looks and feels great. The only downside is that the music and ambient sounds get pretty repetitive. A huge percentage of matches are incredibly fun, and you can always find a challenge that suits you. You’ll discover plenty of surprising new interactions as you play. I like the local meta — it doesn't drain your brain outside of matches. Still, I’d love to see the devs add more customization options in the future.

Overall: This game does a phenomenal job at using systems the player is likely to already be familiar with and weave those in together to leave the player with a game that can be engaged with in whatever capacities are most interesting to that particular player. I particularly like using the numbers and chess pieces together to the point that the game isn't really even about words anymore. That being said, I've had a lot of fun with runs that largely rely on my own vocabulary to carry me forward and it's an equally enjoyable time. Art: The art style and and writing are delightfully charming, and the music is wicked good. It's the perfect vibe to relax to for anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours- I have to set timers so I know how long has passed lol. There's a good selection of characters that all come with their own run-specific quirk, and the designs clearly had a lot of love poured into them (bosses too). Challenge/Replayability: This game also manages to be genuinely challenging without ever feeling unfair. I think getting this balance down must have taken a lot of effort on the developers' part, since even when I lose, I'm just thinking, "Oh man, I should've used this sticker or that stamp or used my consumables a little more efficiently". This is what keeps the game from getting stale since I can approach the challenges in a lot of different ways. Demo: This game has a brilliant demo. I've played other demos just to see that they're buggy/unfinished fractions of a level that give you little to go off of. This is nothing like that. I got to play the game, learn some of the mechanics, try multiple characters, and really get hooked. It was reasonable and the full version is absolutely worth it to support these kinds of good practices. Suggestions: -I have really only one major gripe with the game; there isn't a great way to learn more about the mechanics of the game, and I've found myself a little bit lost at times wracking my brain for what a certain item does. Some kind of glossary type thing would be very helpful. I've noted that during some of the in-game tips, it suggests experimenting and such- I don't speak for every player, but for me, I'd rather just know what each mechanic does so that I have the room to craft my build on good information. -Another suggestion is to be able to see the word that you made last turn- it shows you the word including cursed tiles but I don't believe it tells you what it actually was, which some items care about. -Last suggestion would be a dictionary or definition pop up when submitting a word. One of my favorite games growing up was Bookworm Deluxe, and I loved when Lex would let me know what the word I submitted had meant. TLDR; One of the freshest approaches to word games I've seen. It combines the roguelike strength of something like Balatro with the word puzzling of a game like Bookworm. The art is very pleasant and the soundtrack accompanies the game very well. This is a very valuable purchase- and my time in-game doesn't include all the hours I spent just in the very generous demo.

Awesome game. It's Balatro meets Bookworm. It leans ever so slightly in the Balatro direction over Bookworm, but Bookworm is one of my all-time greats - this scratches myitch. I only have one minor criticism which is that there wild letters are so common that sometimes you are just randomly clicking around to try and make up whatever word matches without knowing what it is. There's a lot of replayability with different characters.