I’m a sucker for a good wordy roguelike, and I’m sitting on a collection of them that I’d like to go back and play more of. The problem is, in a genre that promotes deep thought and careful consideration, these games often end up feeling quite similar.
However, now and then, a new word game punches through the noise and puts an interesting spin on a genre that can often work the mind, but leave the rest of the senses thoroughly undernourished.
Tomb of the Bloodletter is the latest word-based roguelike deckbuilder to catch my attention, and after playing several hours over the last couple of days, I’d like to tell you a bit more about it.
What is Tomb of the Bloodletter, then?
Developed by Ethan’s Secretions, which is a strange name for a game developer, by the way. I mean, yuck, secretions…
Developed by Ethan Goldreyer – that’s better, much more wholesome – Tomb of the Bloodletter is a word game with deckbuilding elements, and it wants you to delve into the deepest recesses of your brain to find obscure words to use in battles against strange monsters in a dungeon crawl for the ages.
From the first loading screen until your last miserable death, Tomb of the Bloodletter delivers a challenging and entertaining word-first experience that does a great job of introducing new ideas and clever little systems as you advance.
Each battle takes place against a humorous hand-drawn opponent, like the cyclist without a bike, and you must play words that activate special moves in order to defeat them before they take you down.
A War of Words
Everything comes down to the words you play. When plotting your journey through each region, you must make a path using a word. The first zone, for example, requires a word that is three letters long. On your on-screen keyboard, there are letter tiles that offer rewards, so making a word out of these letters means you can level up faster.
Then, in battle, your various abilities are distributed across your keyboard. Making a word out of the right letters will activate more powers during that turn. You might deal damage, heal up a bit, weaken your enemy, or even damage yourself (which doesn’t sound ideal, but there are times when it works out well).
Certain letters have powers that activate the abilities on other tiles. This means that you might get a damage boost if you play a word with the letters in the right order. When you get several tiles with different positive and negative abilities to consider, and others are made unavailable due to the actions of your enemies, the possibilities can feel borderline endless.
Things get even more interesting when you start adding in new tiles and so-called magicks, as these require you to make increasingly complex words. On top of that, you can get trinkets that reinforce certain playstyles, and there are four different playable characters – the Adventurer, the Heretic, the Prophet and the Scholar – each with their own mechanics to learn.
Despite looking a little crude – a style which I actually really engaged with – Tomb of the Bloodletter delivers a stern challenge that really tied up my brain for the hours that I spent with it. It’s got a ton more personality than most of the titles that are similar to it, and when I finally get around to writing my round-up of roguelike word games, this one’s going to be sitting near the top of the page!
Tomb of the Bloodletter is out now on PC (Win), and I played the game via access kindly provided via the developer and their PR buds!
