Beyond Words

I've played most of the word games on Steam and for me, this is one of the more enjoyable ones. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have done well, which is a pity as it is much better than fairly popular, not very good, word games like Word Play. There is definitely a strong Balatro influence. Most of your points will come from getting the intentionally overpowered modifiers. I like how each area is a separate mini game with different board layouts. Well worth the modest asking price.

Very enjoyable game and quite different in its format. I would give it 4 out of 5 stars as some of The Boss rounds are very hard and sometimes make the round truly impossible, and you then can't progress. I don't mind rounds being hard, but making a round impossible is just frustrating and stops it from being fun. Otherwise, a great game.

It's definitely a good concept and makes for some engaging gameplay, but could be executed better. Initially I liked the game but the more I played it the less I like it. I'm not sure if I'll play it much if at all after this, that said I've done about 10 hours so far so it's at least recommendable from that point. It's not always clear to me what effect the cards and stuff have on the score, even though there are clear efforts to show this in the game. There's also way too many different things going on, different restrictions etc, so difficulty level is pitched too high initially. I know the idea is that as the player improves, they can come back and try those earlier levels again, but it's pitched too much in that direction. Also, the boss conditions vary wildly - you can be given an easy boss like no discards allowed, or a hard one like the target score is doubled. It's almost as if the developers just tried every idea they had and mashed it together, without trying to aim for a reasonable balance. The main reason I like it is that I can play a word or 2, then do other tasks and then come back to it without worrying about forgetting what I was doing in the game. So for the casual gamer, it's a great game where you can just take breaks like that extremely easily, you can play 5 mins at a time if you want to, which is exactly how I like to play games.

Anita?

Got this game because I read about it in retro gamer and wanted to the boys from rare who bought us goldeneye. Actually turns out it’s super fun and addictive, like balatro with words, and I find making words more interesting than making poker hands

It's pretty fun, but if you're expecting a Scrabble-type game this isn't really it. Because of the way the scoring system works, the words you actually make are fairly irrelevant and it's more about the 'score level' of their length and whatever multipliers you have. At the higher levels, the actual letter values, for the most part, have barely any bearing on the score of your word. I also think the game relies too heavily on wildcards which is another reason why it doesn't feel like Scrabble. Also, the letter Y should count as both a vowel and a consonant since it can be both.