Beyond Words is Scrabble given the Balatro treatment

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

The Beyond Words demo comes with a prominent but confusing pedigree: it proudly states it’s “from the makers of Goldeneye and Timesplitters” but bears absolutely no relation to either, rendering the association moot to the point of negativity. It’s like emphasising Babe 2: Pig In The City is “from the maker of Mad Max: Fury Road”: factually accurate, and doubtless both benefit from the same hard-won expertise, but you wouldn’t want to leave die-hard fans of either together without supervision.

There is no shooting, sci-fi or even synth music here: it’s Scrabble, and specifically Scrabble given the Balatro roguelike treatment, to an almost embarrassing degree of fidelity. You’re rewarded for placing longer words and using more annoying letters in the standard Scrabble style, but everything after that is overpoweringly reminiscent of LocalThunk’s creation. 

You have a set of power cards granting buffs and multipliers, consumable boost cards that level up scores, and a store window at the end of each round to purchase more of both, using coins accumulated according to your remaining moves and discards. As you proceed your tiles steadily become more blinged-out with buffs and upgrades, and the multipliers for different word lengths become steadily sillier. Periodically, there is a boss round, which introduces debuffs and other limits on your ability to hit the score count required to proceed.

It works for broadly the same reason Balatro does, because it’s exactly like Balatro, and the level of reproduction is so flagrant as to feel slightly disreputable. But hey, shameless cribbing is what the games industry is built on, and Beyond Words bolts on enough extras to stick the landing in a way that similarly-pitched roguelikes like Word Play and Wordatro do not. It’s not wholly original, but it is wholly compelling, and own-brand dopamine hits almost the same as the premium stuff.

The board doesn’t reset after each round and unlike Scrabble there’s nobody else putting words down, so you can box yourself in if you’re not careful, giving a discreet but distinct tension as you progress. The boards are increasingly elaborate and scattered with powerup squares to tempt you into flamboyant but unwise clustering of vowels, and it openly encourages you to deploy blasphemous exploits like nouns, brand names and two-letter abominations of the sort that would lead real Scrabble games to end in relationship-harming levels of passive aggression. 

It’s not possible for it to pick up the pace all that much, because ultimately this is about staring at letters until you come up with a suitable word, but it’s removed as much friction and bolted on as many flourishes as the core format permits. This, perhaps, is where the pedigree of the creators shows, and there’s a moreishness that makes this the best Scrabble roguelike I’ve come across yet.

It’s just a shame the aesthetic is so bland: all cheery colours, jolly music and twee child-friendly iconography that brings to mind toddler-distracting mobile games. They’re so glossily generic, in fact, as to make me suspect they were created with generative AI - although there’s no formal indication that’s the case, and the demo is compulsive enough that I kept playing anyway. It’s a missed opportunity to give Beyond Words its own personality, though, rather than something that feels stitched together from other people’s: it’s a good game, but a peculiarly soulless one.