Watchword

Really really lovely! I was fortunate enough to do some testing for this throughout the development (and bought my own copy today), and it was great to watch the game grow into what it is now. The core play is so enjoyable — think chill Bananagrams — and the roguelike elements help keep things fresh and interesting. I'm looking forward to this being my cozy wind-down game for a long time. Highly recommended! [Full Steam Deck compatibility is still in progress, but it's totally playable in the current state, with just a few hiccups here and here, and is how I've spent the majority of my time with the game!]

The game has promise, but there are a few fundamental issues which unfortunately make it difficult to enjoy. The game is aesthetically very messy, to the point it's a detriment to the gameplay, and for me personally just painful to look at. The lack of cohesion, combined with missing information in the tutorial, mean it's easy to miss important options. You can't see what some items do before you buy them, and some of the descriptions are messy, to the point you don't actually know what the item is supposed to do. And some seemingly important effects seem either unobtainable, or too rare to the point that it's of a detriment to the gameplay. There is a lot of good here too, don't get me wrong. The core concept of the gameplay, crossing word games and Balatro is maybe the best core implementation of those concepts I've seen so far. Other games of this ilk, like Word Play, get caught up in needing to have a complete knowledge of extremely long words to be able to do well, whereas with this, the weight between needing to know words and needing to build your point engine well, seem to match quite nicely. There's maybe a bit too much use for cake, and not enough use for coins, but the idea of having not every upgrade store available after each run is interesting, and works well. Ultimately, with a bit of polish, tweaking, and a couple of QoL changes, I'd have very little to complain about from the mechanical side of things. But visually, probably nothing short of an entire redesign from scratch would allow me to play it again.

This deserves much, much more attention. If you enjoy Balatro and anagram word games, this is essentially those two things combined into one, and it's exactly as fun and creative as it sounds. Give it more attention, it's really great.

I played this game throughout the beta. It's a compelling roguelite word game that has you forming words to make combos and rack up tons of points until you've won. The replay value is well worth the price.

Confusing and poor UI. Good idea, but not executed well enough.

played the demo of this several months back and have been hyped for the release ever since. i've played a good amount of word-based roguelites, and this one is by far my favourite in terms of strategy and depth, while still being easy to learn (and hard to master). can see me spending a lot of hours on this!

A mix of Balatro and Scrabble, this game's central gameplay is super strong, with lots of potential mix-ups and modifiers to make runs unique. You might not find combos as game-breaking as in some roguelikes, but there's still plenty of build variety. The art style is clean and charming, and I think that the sound design is serviceable. Generally there is some room for bits of polish, but that doesn't detract from the core game-loop. My main criticism is that the tutorial, as it stands now, is pretty overwhelming – there are a lot of popup dialogues containing blocks of text. That said, most mechanics can be intuited without said tutorial, and once you get past it you'll easily get sucked in. I'd strongly recommend WatchWord to any fans of crossword-like word games (:

I was intrigued when others called this "Balatro and Scrabble". This has been a blast to play, scratching that word-game itch as well as the fun repetitive roguelike gameplay I expect. I can't wait to see further updates with more and more content as I feel this has so much potential.

If you're a fan of Wordle and "number go up" games, this one's for you! Charming and fun to play. Big "alright, one more game then" energy 👌

if you have a scrabble itch but you are looking to take it up a notch this is the game for you. It has a bunch of modifiers and mechanics that make it possible to get some satisfyingly big scores without being a linguistic genius but also leaves room for the book worms to go crazy.