You also get bigger bonuses if you’ve cleared large rectangular areas, and stones severely damage those bonuses. The point values decrement each turn they are not used, eventually becoming unusable stone at zero. Alphabear presents the player with a grid of letters from which you must make words and each letter has a point value. On the surface, Alphabear is a bright mix of puzzle and word play saturated with cute bears. Nearly three years ago, I loved then broke up with Alphabear (Spry Fox, 2015). I felt like I was looking for something like that in Spelltower. The developers bundled in a zen mode which frees you from the repercussions of missing obstacles and tools you up with infinite ammunition: smash away, my friend. After a few levels, the standard game gets hard, demanding rapid and precise firing. Smash Hit (Mediocre AB, 2014) is a first-person action game where you throw balls to smash obstacles made of glass it should have been called Window Smashing Simulator 2014. I needed something different, a mode in which I could blossom. This did not scratch the right itch at all and there was an obvious limit to the scores you could pull off. No pressure to perform, just spell words. Here Spelltower piles up 150 tiles and asks you to make as many words out of it as you can. The third, Tower mode, might seem to be exactly what I was looking for. Note that I’ve discussed only two of the three modes. I was grasping for a mode less taxing where I could just deploy words without quite so much anxiety. I was always opening the app reluctantly to stare at the latest Board of Unfairness, one skirmish in a long war of attrition I was destined to lose. It seemed that Spelltower frequently pumped out obnoxious letters like Q and X and the constant stream of long word requirements were difficult to satisfy with such a narrow board. In the final game, I accepted I wasn’t enjoying myself. Inevitably, I would stare at the board for a long time before making a move. But each moment-to-moment snapshot is a puzzle in itself, one with no guarantee of solution. The player experiences rising panic, the feeling that the walls are closing in. Each move you make undermines your future – remember, those words you’re burning up can’t be used again. In fact, you don’t have to throw away half an hour before it gets serious – it’s bloody efficient in getting you to think. The more progress you make, the more tiles with minimum word length requirements appear. I found Rush mentally debilitating – stress killed my ability to divide attention between word hunting and managing towers. “Puzzle mode” adds a new row after each move while “Rush mode” is a race against time as a new row is added every few seconds. On Android, there are three single player modes (actually there’s four, but let’s just pretend expert mode doesn’t exist). It becomes crucial to attack the towers on the edges because they are harder to wear down. As you are more likely to form words from letters that have neighbours on both sides – simply because there are more possibilities available – what inevitably happens is that you build up tile debt on the edges of the screen. A word can only be used once to make a match and some letters come with minimum word length requirements. There are some twists to make the game even harder. Normally in this flavour of puzzle game the player is tasked to match tile colours but in Spelltower they must make words from the letters printed on the tiles to remove them. Players must match tiles to clear space while the game keeps adding more to the board the game is over if the tiles reach the top. Some stupid people might argue a word game isn’t a puzzle but let’s ignore those people for now. Spelltower belongs to the special category of “word puzzle games” which are a world apart from your stereotypical abstract indie puzzler: the rules of language are knotted up with the rules of the game. The game died in stasis.Īnd I came to the sobering conclusion that maybe I didn’t want it to be so hard. After, I think, a couple of weeks, I made the call. The last game I played kept going and going. Either my game was too short and unsatisfying or it was really long and taxing. I installed it on my Android, gave it a spin. It’s like the best word game, the best, I heard. This is the third part of The Ouroboros Sequence, a series on puzzle games.
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