Steam's latest word game has become my latest obsession

For eight of the last 24 hours, I’ve been obsessively playing Word Play, the new title from Game Maker’s Toolkit. It’s a word-creating puzzler, where points total up from creating words with a limited selection of letters. There’s a roguelike spin on this one, with meta-progression over the rounds coming through modifiers and tools.

It’s exactly what you would imagine from the image above - each letter is worth a set number of points, and those points get totalled up to give your word score. However, there are some twists here that make it all the more fiendish. You can’t play words with less than four letters, and there are tools that add tiles with exclamation marks, full stops, or even ‘ing’ and ‘ers.’ As much as I hate to use the simple comparison, think of Boggle, but with a Balatro twist.

You can have a maximum of five modifiers and five tools, so with some good planning you can chain together some massive scores. You could get extra points for including back-to-back of the same letter, or a double score for starting words with a particular letter, and when these are paired up with bonus rounds that occur randomly, the dopamine that rushes in from words scoring over 400 points brings back the waves of pleasure felt in other roguelikes when everything just clicks.

Word Play - Game Maker's Toolkit

Each game - there are four difficulty levels - is played over 12 rounds, and getting through each round is a simple case of meeting the required point target that grows with each passing round. Get to the end, and you win; run out of plays, one of which is used with each word submitted, and you lose. Thankfully, there’s no losing in the casual mode, if you want something a bit more chill.

It’s interesting that a timer hasn’t been implemented, which gives you as long as you need to see longer words, and that’s key here. You see, a four-letter word doesn’t score any bonuses, but play a five, six, or seven-letter word, and you get an extra five points per letter used. Above that, you get 10 or 15 points on top, pushing you to find the longest words, rather than cop out with a bunch of short words.

At times, I’ve found myself wandering away from my PC in the middle of a round to make a cup of tea, returned and suddenly seen a nine-letter word for a whopping score. This relaxed style provides the best chance, and it creates a forced feeling of success. My only quibble with Word Play is how often I end up with a crazy number of vowel tiles, which can be tweaked with the right tools, but sometimes feels like the randomisation is against me.

Word Play - Game Maker's Toolkit

When I’m not playing Word Play, I’m thinking about it, wondering whether my last run would have resulted in a higher score, or a completion, from simply choosing different modifiers. For example, there’s a modifier that adds points to your total whenever you add letter tiles to your bag of tiles. In the last game I played, I passed on this one, then picked another perk that added 15 tiles to the bag, which would have resulted in an extra 15 points on every word I played.

To illustrate just how much this latest Steam word game has consumed my last day, I put two eggs in a saucepan to boil and a couple of hours later, a loud bang brought me to the kitchen where the pot had boiled dry and the eggs had exploded. Egg debris everywhere, mushed yolk on my ceiling, the stench of burning lingered. Still, I snagged a 10-letter word out of it, though, so there’s that.