I try my best not to spend too much time comparing one game to another in the context of a review. It tends to get in the way of looking at the game in front of me and assessing it for what it is. But in the case of Beyond Words – a game you wouldn’t know came from key creators of GoldenEye 007 and TimeSplitters unless someone told you – what it is, is a nearly 1:1 take on Balatro that switches out poker for Scrabble.
I don’t say that as an exaggeration, either. If you think about a feature or mechanic of Balatro, there’s a very high chance it’s here in Beyond Words. As someone that’s sunk hundreds of hours into the former and a Scrabble afficionado, it made for a smooth enough onboarding process, but if you’re coming to this with no experience in LocalThunk’s virally-successful roguelike card game it’s going to be a different story.
For context of what this game actually is, the core idea is essentially that of Scrabble – placing down letter tiles from a randomly-filled hand to form words, and then playing subsequent words by building from or onto those already on the board. The twist here is that instead of playing against other human opponents, your only goal is to beat a certain score within a limited number of words, advancing through rounds with increasing score goals while remaining on the same board. And instead of your word score being based on just the numerical values of the tiles, your total comes from multipliers associated with different word lengths, modifier tiles, power cards and boosters and a bunch of other possible conditions.
When I say that having played Balatro before jumping into Beyond Words is advantageous, I mean it. Based on the scarcity of actual information or guidance within, the game almost expects that you already know about how the scoring system works, what Jokers Power Cards are and how they interact along the top bar of the play field, how you might use the Tarot Booster and Planet Level cards you pull from randomised backs and so on. There’s almost nothing in one game that isn’t present in the other.
It’s a decent enough formula at its core though, and suitably addictive if you’re into word puzzles, but the execution is frustratingly problematic. For starters, the UI is simply not great, especially when playing with a controller. It’s routinely difficult to tell where your active selection is at any point, and parts of the screen that might contain information crucial to your strategy are either finicky to navigate to or just straight-up inaccessible – like the icons that should tell you what a “boss” level’s gimmick is but have no tooltip whatsoever. It should be easy to tell just by the game state and what’s on-screen, with at least some confidence, whether a particular play will put you on the path to victory or not, and in Beyond Words that just doesn’t happen.
This extends to the overall look of the game and its art direction, which is to say that there is none. Part of Balatro’s charm is how committed it is to its scanline-filtered pixel art presentation, keeping it cohesive and, crucially, readable throughout while selling a sinister undertone that extends to its wonderful card art. Beyond Words has none of this. It’s a slapdash of Windows XP-era rounded corners and ‘fun’ fonts with very little consistency, especially in the art used for the power cards and boosters that feels like it was all pulled from a PowerPoint stock catalogue. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a masterpiece, but it needs to make sense at a glance, especially when its already bad at conveying information.
There are absolutely things that I enjoy about Beyond Words, though. I quite like the actual structure of game progression which, instead of just hoping that you’ll keep replaying the same run types for the thrill of your own betterment, actually presents a campaign of sorts with a fair number of different levels to play through. Each of these has its own twist from preset power cards and conditions to whole different board layouts, and as long as you can make it through at least three of nine rounds you’ll unlock subsequent stages to move onto. It makes it feel more like a game I can actually “finish,” which is nice, and there are some truly fun setups to be found in the mix.
I’m also fond of how loose Beyond Words’ dictionary seems to be. In a game where the progression of systems and chance can completely counter the intuitive Scrabble play of making big words with tricky letters, it’s good that I can fudge a bunch of stuff or even go for proper nouns and straight-up swears. It’s good that there’s no online component, considering that you can slur up a storm in this thing, and very well may be tempted to when it’s your final turn in the final round and you really need the points.
Thing is, as much as there is here that I don’t love, I’ve found myself coming back to it pretty well every day just to get in a game or two. Beyond Words might not have the sauce to put it on the level of the titles that clearly inspire it, but that core idea of Balatro x Scrabble is compelling enough on its own that I’m just happy someone made it.
Reviewed on PS5 | Review copy supplied by publisher
Great
- Scrabble as a Balatro-like works as a core idea
- Enjoyable campaign structure
- Mercifully loose dictionary that lets you swear
Not great
- Difficult to play with a controller
- UX and art need a lot of work