🔠 Word Forward | Nintendo Switch | Review | 8.5/10 | "Word Up" 🔠 @thalamusdigital #IndieGame #IndieGames #GameDev

Amidst all the 100+ hours of RPG-ing, shooting, adventuring and racing, sometimes it’s nice to take things slow and get casual. Word-based games have always held an allure for me and I’m pleased to say that Word Forward is the newest title to suck me in.

It’s a simple premise, you have to make all of the letters in a 5x5 grid disappear by making words that are three letters or longer. When I first installed and attempted the game, I was of the mind that the challenge would be in finding words in a specific order and that only one route was possible in order to move on to the next puzzle, but that isn’t the case as there are – pleasantly – multiple ways to proceed.

With 500 stages to make your way through, the challenge is actually much more tactical and revolves around using your abilities to clear the words. Your one-time-only powers are the ability to change a single letter, jumble all letters or use a bomb to blow up a single, troublesome tile. The other ability that you have is to swap any two tiles around, and this is earned in-game by getting words comprised of four or more letters and they are handy.

The concept is simple and the stark, bold visuals really allow you to focus on the task at hand – you can also use touchscreen controls in handheld mode – and the controls are intuitive. The only downside really lies in the music - the one track used is fine and quite mellow...but it’s looped. Realistically you’ll be muting the sound after twenty minutes or so as it does get tiresome pretty quickly, although it is a cool beat, initially. A shame as I think that 5-10 similar tracks would have been perfect.

There is an element of replayability here, in how you can get a higher star rating by retaining three of your abilities by the end of the stage, and in terms of length, it’s certainly great value for money as you aren’t going to be blasting through these 500 stages in a hurry!