Given the fact that I was an English major in college, and generally an all-around word nerd, I’ll gladly admit that I loves me a good puzzler that tests my vocabulary. Sadly, despite the preponderance of puzzle games in the Switch eShop as a whole, ones featuring words are a bit scarce. Beyond Words absolutely fits the bill, but it ups the ante of challenge even further, incorporating quite a number of roguelike elements that help to push this past simply being about the words you can form, and into quite a strategic challenge as well. Absolutely better played in handheld mode using the touchscreen, while it works fine with a controller, that does make everything slow down a bit.

For anyone familiar with the excellent poker roguelike Balatro, this will quickly feel quite familiar. In place of playing cards you’ll be working with letter tiles, and using general scoring rules very similar to Scrabble as a base, your goal is to try to earn as many points as possible with every tile you lay down. The first layer of strategy is simply making your words as long as possible, but smart players will always be looking for opportunities to add a single tile to an existing word already on the board, and then form a new word with it, ensuring that both words will now be fully scored. The second layer is trying to take advantage of special spaces available to you, and in the interests of variety you’ll find that each new challenge you tackle will have a different layout with different bonus spaces and arrangement, ensuring you can’t get too comfortable and complicating your efforts to ensure you don’t end up accidentally leaving yourself with nothing to play. The final layer comes from the cards you’ll have the opportunity to purchase between rounds which can vary wildly in what they’ll give you strategically, whether simply additional points or multipliers, bonuses that are dependent on the words or letters you use, and more. These can radically change how you choose to play, but getting less-than-ideal ones can also absolutely sink your run.

My main problem with the game, and this is as someone who loves roguelikes and challenges, is that it feels unnecessarily brutal up front. Yes, all roguelikes don’t tend to give you much love early on, but I think my issue is with the scale of early failures I had while generally pulling great words, and having some decent strategies. Quite simply, the scores demanded in boss battles very quickly got out of control, more often than not because they kept being the type that would double the score instead of some other challenge. While this didn’t always beat me, it just felt like a situation where the game could throw the player more of a bone, and get an early win before throwing the gauntlet down a little later. With new stages to unlock as far as the eye could see, why make it so punishing quickly, and not leave some sunlight for players to feel like they can pull it out? With the bar being set by Balatro, while it was by no means an easy game, it seemed to have a better challenge curve early on, encouraging people to stick with it. In this case, if even someone who loves the entire idea of this game is getting discouraged, maybe it could use some tweaking in the early going.