As alluded to in that monstrosity of a headline, Beyond Words is a new roguelike word game by developer MindFuel Games. I mentioned “dab hands” because this particular dev team is formed from the ashes of Free Radical, and includes former Rare man David Doak, who was an important part of the team that delivered one of the greatest video games of all time, GoldenEye on the N64. But I digress…
Beyond Words is not a GoldenEye spiritual successor, nor is it a new Timesplitters FPS. Instead, we’re here to discuss a rather devious word game that takes a bunch of different ideas and merges them with aplomb.
So what is Beyond Words, then?
I’ve played a bunch of roguelike word games recently, as part of my research for a deeper dive into this evolving sub-genre, and I can tell you that Beyond Words is certainly one of the more polished offerings in the space.
When I first played a demo of Beyond Words some months ago, it felt a bit disjointed from a presentation standpoint. However, that part of the game seems to have been given plenty of polish for 1.0, and the whole thing has evolved into a visually cohesive and easy to parse blend of Scrabble and Balatro.
The campaign takes you across a traditional roguelike map, where you move between encounters denoted by nodes. Different challenges await you depending on your route, and while the fiendish time-based levels are easy to spot, you’ll have to jump into a location to find out what’s waiting for you.
The bit like Balatro
Just like LocalThunk’s now iconic Poker-themed deckbuilder, you have a bunch of power cards that dictate what happens when you play words. These are Beyond Words’ equivalent of Joker cards; they do all sorts of cool things, such as reward certain letters or types of words, but the twist here is that you’re often assigned specific power cards that you must use on that stage. This shapes your tactics and keeps you constantly thinking in new directions, and I felt like I was playing a hybrid campaign with the challenge mode baked in.
Also, just like Balatro, this is a game about boosting both sides of the combo. Your power and booster cards, plus your letter tiles, all combine in various ways to boost your multiplier. The higher these two key numbers are, the better your overall score, and these scores scale quickly, forcing you to adapt strategies on the fly.
The bit like Scrabble
Beyond Words takes place on a Scrabble-like playing board, with different grids offering bonuses to the tiles placed on them. Unlike Scrabble, however, these boards quickly become bonkers, like the one I played that looked like a winking emoji.
There’s a big reliance on the fundamentals of Scrabble, but there are a whole bunch of games that do this, and I’m not complaining because I’ve been enjoying my time with the game. In fact, I really like how the challenge evolves over each run. These self-contained scenarios sit within the wider campaign structure, but once you’re in, they play out over multiple rounds, with game-changing mini-bosses to contend with at various points and an economy specific to it.
This persistence is key because the idiotic word placements you make during round one are going to come back and haunt you before too long. As such, there’s a meta-layer to each campaign where you’re not just thinking about the power cards and tile upgrades you’re accruing, but futurproofing your strategy via clever word placement.
A final word
As you’ve no doubt deduced by now, I’ve been very engaged by Beyond Words and its blend of tiles and cards. While it does borrow ideas from Letterlike, Balatro, and Scrabble, the whole thing has been knitted together quite nicely, and the evolving challenge has a board game feel that I genuinely appreciated.
Beyond Words is definitely an interesting spin on some familiar gameplay tropes, and while it does feel a little unbalanced at times with difficulty spikes lurking, the scope of its challenge has the potential to lock you in for extended periods of deep focus.
Beyond Words is out on PC, PlayStation, Switch and Xbox and we played via access kindly provided by the publisher and their loyal customers in PR.
