Pronoun Palace

Everything about this game is refreshing. From a gameplay standpoint, it’s the most intentionally-designed roguelike I’ve played in a long while. In a world saturated with “Balatro-but”s that clumsily hawk common idioms of the genre, this game is utterly surgical about what is and isn’t here. It makes for a game where every mechanic, enemies and spells alike, is a fun and interesting new puzzle to solve. There’s not a single thing here that feels unfair, bloated, or sloggy. And then from a queer art standpoint, GOD is it nice to play something that doesn’t automatically assume I’m an emotionally-exhausted escapist looking for a cozy coffee shop free from the concept of hate crimes. It’s queer media that nips and scratches when you try to pet it, but approaches real world queer issues with youthful vigor and levity rather than the anger of a tired activist. And beyond those two massive things it gets right, it’s also great for its really flexible time commitment. You can spend hours on multiple runs in a row, or just do half a fight while you drink your morning tea. Overall, phenomenal and highly recommended. This is a must-play and an instant classic.

on one end, i do like the game's satire, that's all i can really say even as a transfem. i do think its effective edgy satire that, while it is in-you-face, is also not overbearing or intrusive. nor does it ever feel overly 4tran edgy, which i'm thankful for. it mostly keeps to its framing as a dystopian satire. on the OTHER end, though... i love this game's approach to game design. i went on a journey to find the perfect roguelike for me, and i walked through so many brainless Balatro-likes. i hate the progression of all these Balatro-like-roguelikes that have appeared recently. Pronoun Palace gets two things right: 1) it actually challenges my ability to think instead of my ability to "find optimal items to assemble a meta strategy that will automatically win for me like 99% of all other roguelikes" which actually makes it feel engaging to find words. i love a game with no progression, it means all your growth comes from you, and i appreciate the rejection of standard roguelike relics and card design stuff. and 2) it makes me actually wanna engage with the game mechanics instead of always trying to avoid or optimize everything away. this game has EXCELLENT enemy design from the perspective of making you actually engage with an enemy's gimmick. i'll take this over the 100's of games that make enemies that instantly ♥♥♥♥ you over and make you never wanna engage with anything again outside of the most safe, boring cheese strategy. this game was the endpoint of my roguelike/roguelite journey, this was it, the game i've been searching for this entire time. AND it's gay on top of that, what a win/win.

A rogue-like about trans people, where "puppygirl" is an acceptable word? Of course it's amazing!

scrabble but based and transgender

more pronouns per square game centimetre. and i literally like playing it

I have quite a few gripes with this game, but it's become one of my most played games regardless, and that is because of the one aspect of it that is its absolute saving grace, and is the main reason it's worth recommending over other rogue likes. That is, that it's actually a word game roguelike. It's not Balatro if it were Wordle, but Wordle if it were Balatro, if that makes any sense. The mechanics of the game are designed around finding words, there is very little room for strategies or builds that allow you to win without having to find new words. This essentially just makes it Wordle or Bookworm Adventures but with more strategy and a bunch of extra gimmicks that help spice things up. The 4x4 board may look restricting at first, but it makes up for that with items that can give you more options, bigram and trigram tiles, and segments where the board is made larger. There's enough there that someone's somehow managed to spell the longest English word in this game. The unlockable items are mostly very good, and can have some interesting interactions with each other. The enemies, gimmicks, and different playable characters are also all very well designed and present a lot of interesting and unique challenges. On the harder difficulties you will be expected to have a good strategy and won't be able to pull through just by finding long words, but finding words never gets pushed to the side. So overall, it's probably my favorite word game, and even if that's not a very high bar, I still just really like this game. If I were to give a few critiques, I'd say that not all the design philosophies this game follows are good. One of my biggest gripes is that some of the harder difficulties can feel a bit too easy, and I know that sounds like I'm just bragging, but I feel this way even when I'm finding the game difficult, which I know doesn't make much sense but I'm having a hard time explaining myself here. Basically, I feel it's more about the specific changes higher difficulties make. [spoiler]I haven't tried out Hazel difficulty just yet, I know it does a lot, but that's supposed to be a bonus challenge and not part of the main game, so I think it's fair not to include that in this review.[/spoiler] The difficulty changes are mostly superficial, and don't change how you go about winning most fights, so the same old strategies tend to work most of the time. This is especially prominent with the bosses. The amount of times I've needed to fight them has ironically made it so I actually die less to the bosses than I do the regular enemies now (minus the final boss). I'm thinking that maybe I'd feel differently about this if there were more bosses, or harder variants of the bosses [spoiler](I can imagine a Public Broadcast variant who makes use of both the negative and spike gimmicks working well)[/spoiler]. But something I'd really like to see is some difficulty changes that focus more on changing enemies and bosses than the player, such as some special random effects applied to bosses and enemies, or something. Most of the difficulty settings focus on changing the player's abilities, but I really feel like more of them should focus on changing enemy abilities. For example, it could be cool to see gimmicks like the immortal tiles be put to better use by allowing any enemy to add one to the board. This could make it so I might actually need to make more unique strategic decisions when fighting bosses. Another gripe I have with this game (that might mostly just be a me thing), is that the amount of unique art in the game doesn't accurately portray the amount of content the game actually has. I would say this game released with a moderate amount of gameplay content for what it is, but it feels like there's a lot less there than there actually is due to just how frequently you'll be looking at the same few characters and backgrounds all the time. It was fine when Balatro did this because Balatro is a pure card game with no real characters or story, but when you have a world and characters in your game, people are going to be expecting a bit more visual variety. A few big things that stick out to me is that each characters' attack animations are always the same, so you'll be watching the same animations almost every turn. And the shadow enemies, although they're a good gameplay concept, they make it feel like there's less enemies than there actually are, since half of them are mostly just palette swaps. And spoiler for this next one, [spoiler]the final boss playing differently for each character is also a very good gameplay concept, but it visually looks and sounds like the exact same fight every time, which makes each version of the fight feel a lot less unique than it actually is. Some sort of visual indication for Nobody's phase as Jubilist would be nice. And personally, I would like to fight Nobody in a bathtub as the fisher.[/spoiler] Anyway, yeah. That's my review. Hope someone reads all this, and maybe gets something out of it.

i beat the game with all the characters and spent 2 hours sitting here trying to figure out how to review it so i'll keep it simple, woke scrabble roguelike that gives a good representation of what it's like to be different kinds of trans in 2026, made me feel good about being queer in a world that doesnt want me to be

Waow[💥]based

I love being transgender

gay people tomorrow morning