WordSpiral

WordSpiral is a minimalist 1990's-esque word puzzle game where you must build words from adjacent letters on a spiral. Completing a word removes those letters and shrinks the spiral. See how many words you can get! See how big a word you can make! See if you can explain why you spent a couple of grand building a gaming rig just so you can play something that would look bad for a browser game in 1992! I appreciate this is probably some school project or something... but then we get to ask the question... why does this need to be on Steam? Isn't Itch specifically for containing this kind of thing so it doesn't pollute the more serious game stores? And if it is an academic project, why try to get paid for it? Well, these questions often go without answers, and I know, with over 8,000 game reviews now... the answer may elude us for an eternity. Being a very simple letter puzzle game, the business plan here seems to be to compete with the puzzle pages at the back of the newspaper. This is certainly an ambitious profit strategy. Anyway, why shouldn't you buy this game? Let's go over the long, long list of defects. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window. The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers. Steam wasn't designed to compete with Firefox. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game construction kit/toolset, Py'game. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it lets you make games with Python (not a good idea), but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. Might as well try to bake a cake with a screwdriver. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is remarkable, but also to be expected. This complete and utter rejection of the game from gamers should be a keen information point for anyone considering buying shovelware like this. Ok ok, in this case, the game is just a week old.... but launch day is typically the biggest event in the lifecycle for a game, and this one died hard. Gamers just didn't take this seriously (so far), and for good reason. WordSpiral is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. If this is the kind of thing you want to play, there's better word puzzles free on the internet, so there's no sense paying money for this.