I was gifted this game by a Steam friend for my birthday. I don't know if that qualifies as "receiving the product for free" for the purposes of the Steam review, but I've erred on the side of caution.
I've played this game for 70 hours in a quest for achievements, and I guess I've gotten $12 worth of entertainment value from that. But I have to attach so many caveats to my recommendation, at least in the game's current state, that I wish Steam had a thumbs-sideways option and not just a thumbs-up and thumbs-down. There's a lot of missed potential!
First, take note that this is an adaptation of a smartphone game. The smartphone game is free, but offers additional features either via an annual subscription ($5/year) or a one-time payment ($12 for a lifetime). This $12 Steam version of the game is equivalent to said smartphone game with all the extra stuff unlocked forever, except you play on PC or Steam Deck instead of a smartphone. If you like to try things before you buy them, search for Knotwords on your Apple or Google device. [EDIT 2023-05-06: The mobile versions also get updated more frequently than the Steam version; as of this writing, the Steam version is 7 updates behind the mobile version. On top of all the other issues this review mentions, there's another reason not to buy this game, or at least not this version of it. Get the mobile version instead and get the version that the devs put their actual love into. The only thing that the Steam version has that the mobile version doesn't is that you can use a keyboard and mouse instead of a tiny touch screen.]
There is definitely a solid idea at the core, but I have some issues:
* None of the puzzles have any real symmetry or beauty. If Sudoku has taught us anything, it's that aesthetic appeal can greatly elevate a puzzle. (There's a reason why it was Sudoku that took off and not Number Place, the name it was invented under in an American magazine. Number Place puzzles were generally ugly.)
* There are certain ways in which the vocabulary of this game is deficient. Seeing the same words over and over gets old, especially the 15-letter words in the Classic Sunday puzzles. (I can't count all of the STRAIGHTFORWARD's I've seen!) You'll also never see a 12-, 13-, or 14-letter word.
* Paradoxically, there are times in which the vocabulary of this game is overabundant! As a former dabbler in Scrabble, I am rather familiar with all 107 valid 2-letter words, including many that you'll never see in Knotwords (AA, BI, OE, QI, ZA). I'm not complaining about these words not appearing in Knotwords, as Knotwords aims to be a casual-friendly game, and it's more fun to stretch your mind and recall words that you know than to have to just guess random letter combinations until something like OE is magically declared to be a word somehow. If your puzzle is aimed at the Scrabble-playing community, then more obscure words are more likely to go over well with that crowd, but this is not such a game. So why aren't these standards applied to the entire game's vocabulary? Why does this game expect me to know that CHARIER, MERES, and VIREO are words? I'm a freelance puzzlesmith myself, and even I think these words are BS. Removing these words from the puzzle generation would admittedly pose a risk to the "seeing the same words over and over" problem, but I think that BS Scrabble-ese words are worse. (Side note: nix the "Uncommon Words"-themed puzzles in the puzzlebooks. I only dabbled in Scrabble enough to master the 2-letter BS words, not the 3- and 4-letter ones!) [EDIT 2022-11-29: The game also includes the word SHAT, the past tense of ♥♥♥♥, a verb meaning "to defecate". These words are generally considered vulgar. Maybe this isn't an all-ages game so much.]
* There's not much variety of puzzle styles. Most puzzles are of the "Classic" style, including the Daily Minis (which are 5x5 Classics). The most common alternative style is "Twist", in which each row and column has a number indicating how many vowels (AEIOU) should be in it. You'd think that this would add some logic to the game, but it really doesn't; the vowel counts rarely give you an opportunity to logically deduce that a letter must be a consonant or must be a vowel, and on the rare occasions that they do, you have no way of marking a cell to indicate such. You learn to mostly ignore the numbers unless one of them turns red to indicate that a row or column has too many vowels. Honestly, the main challenge that Twist puzzles introduce is that the regions are bigger, making it more difficult to unscramble the letters within! The monthly puzzlebooks introduce themed puzzles in which the indicated words all fit a theme, but the number of possible themes is limited, and you'll see the same ones twice every month, and thus see the same words over and over within those themes. (The "Flowers" theme even includes the misspelled FUSCHIA [sic]!) The "Start With Vowels" theme which appears in the monthly puzzlebooks gives you all the vowels and simply tasks you with unscrambling the consonants, which is surprisingly a decent change of pace. But there isn't really much else.
* Incommunicado devs make these issues and others difficult to address. I'm pretty sure the "An Adventurer Like You" achievement got broken somehow, because I've met its requirements, and yet I don't have it. Some people have it, so maybe it wasn't broken at an earlier point (but other achievements were broken at those points, and I'm glad that they've been fixed).
Without these issues, this could easily be an excellent game. As it stands, I see it as a good game with painful blemishes.
[EDITED 2023-04-01: I have most of the achievements and am on track to get them all by my next birthday. I will never play this game again after that point. I have also edited my review to a thumbs down. I've left the above review intact for posterity, since it does touch on most of the issues that I have, but the incommunicado devs really need to start fixing big issues. For instance, it has been determined that the "An Adventurer Like You" and "Titular" achievements only trigger if you spell both words required IN THE SAME SESSION. Since you can't replay a solved puzzle unless you cheat by finding your game data on your computer and moving or deleting it, this is remarkably unfair. I'm also not convinced that all four required words for these two achievements appear in the daily puzzle archives. Also, why is SCRUPULOUS one of the words in the "Negative Qualities" category? That's. . . wrong. On the topic of questionable words, some players find it questionable that multi-word phrases appear in certain categories as if they were single words, such as AMERICANBULLDOG in Animals. I'm not one of them, but it's worth mentioning.]
