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.
Beyond Words swerves either fate with some really clever choices. My favourite is how generous its dictionary is. Breaking the tyrannical rules of Scrabble, the game allows almost any word—including names, slang, proper nouns, and, yes, the filthiest swear words you can think of.
It’s amazing how freeing that simple change is—and how funny. Scoring big rounds with British-isms as specific as “botty” and “oik” is so pleasing for this old Englishman, and frankly nothing can beat the thrill of winning a round with the c-word. Australian readers will be pleased to hear you can even score the word “sook”, so there’s never a need to have one.
Combined with a generous allowance of wildcard tiles—asterisks that can be played as any vowel, and question marks that can be played as any letter at all—it makes the actual spelling feel far less stuffy and difficult. It frees you up to enjoy it even as the difficulty ramps up, rather than trying to streamline it away with synergies.
Another key element is the board itself. As in original Scrabble, it sticks around between rounds, allowing you to build on existing words and double-dip on scoring letters. But there isn’t just one square board—each run has its own differently shaped map, and it’s scattered with its own configuration of special squares.
These are activated when a word scores on top of them, and include everything from permanently upgrading the tile placed on top of them, to adding an extra effect to one of your cards, to giving you some extra money for the shop. But with the best squares out towards the edges or otherwise tricky to reach, there’s a strategic element to building your web of words in the direction you want.
The result is that instead of becoming increasingly irrelevant in the face of rising bonuses, your choice of words is crucial to how you’re able to spread yourself around the board. Maybe a three letter word would be enough to score you the round, but a seven letter word will get you onto that epic multiplier space—and if it can end in one of your most commonly used vowels, that’d be even spicier.
If there’s one thing that currently lets the game down, it’s the visual style. When Beyond Words was first shown off, it featured extensive AI-generated art. That’s since all been replaced with proper commissioned art—but, frankly, it still doesn’t feel very human. The generic scenes and characters depicted on items look like something out of a corporate PowerPoint presentation, and there’s no real cohesion in style across the game. Balatro’s certainly got it beat there.
But that one gripe hasn’t stopped me having a blast with the demo, and after an hour of wringing all the content I can out of it, I’m left champing at the bit for the full release. It’s certainly not a new TimeSplitters, but Beyond Words could still be a latter-day hit for two veteran developers regardless.
Read the full article here
