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