Gaming: Balatro Meets Scrabble In This New Roguelike From The Creators Of...

Beyond Words finds the perfect balance between synergy and spelling.

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So, the latest game from FPS legends Steve Ellis and David Doak—who worked on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark at Rare before co-founding Free Radical and creating the TimeSplitters series—is… a spelling game. But putting any disappointment that it's not a shooter aside, the question is: is it any good in its own right?

Based on my time with the demo, currently available to try for free as part of Steam NextFest, I think it's looking surprisingly promising.

In the wake of Balatro's success, there have been a lot of word game roguelikes, essentially reworking the formula but with a Scrabble twist and a bag of tiles instead of a deck of cards. Frankly, a lot of them aren't great.

But, as the name suggests, I think Beyond Words is doing a lot more than your average example of this sub-subgenre.

The core structure is familiar. Playing on what is essentially a Scrabble board, you get a certain amount of moves each round to try and hit a target score. Succeed, and you move onto the next round with a higher target, and then a boss round with some kind of modifier to work around.

Between rounds, you can shop for cards that map pretty directly to Balatro's jokers, triggering bonuses each round in the order they're arranged that can add to your score in various ways—from simply adding to the multiplier, to retriggering certain letters, to increasing the value of certain word lengths.

So far, a pretty standard combo of word game and roguelike, and where I often see these games fall down is in finding the balance between the two. Too much emphasis on bonuses and synergies, and the actual spelling starts to feel irrelevant—often sending you down the path of high-scoring two and three letter words. But equally if the roguelike elements aren't impactful enough, it loses that thrill of mastery and becomes just a dry test of your vocabulary.

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Source: PC Gamer