Leximan review: utterly unhinged but constantly compelling

Leximan is hands-down one of the strangest games I’ve played this year. A wildly unpredictable and gleefully anarchic adventure that leaps between genres so quickly that you’re in danger of whiplash.

By the time the credits rolled I honestly wasn’t sure what exactly I’d just experienced. And yet, I still kind of loved it?

Leximan is not the game I thought it was going to be from the trailers, or indeed from the first 10 minutes of the game itself. You take on the role of Leximan, a young wizard who shows up unannounced at a school for the magically gifted, where the headmaster quickly realises his unique word-based magic is a recipe for chaos.

I believed Leximan would be a game built upon this central mechanic: the titular character’s gift for using word fragments to create spells. As a big fan of things like Scribblenauts and Cryptmaster, I would have been very happy with that.

Certainly, Leximan gets a lot of mileage out of this feature. RPG-style battles see you choosing the best possible word from various fragments to deal with opponents, but the game delights in wrong-footing you at every turn. At one point I figured spelling out DISARM would get a goblin to drop his weapon, when in actuality it just removed his arms. It’s the utterly unhinged touches like this that put me in mind of Undertale on one occasion, and frequently made me laugh out loud.

But while Leximan could have built an entire game around this mechanic, it… doesn’t. Instead, it whirls and thrashes and dances from one deranged vignette to the next with absolutely no rhyme or reason. One moment you’re in a Vampire Survivors-style bullet hell shooter, the next you’re playing a management sim as you work to build a new school. The new gameplay elements come at you with the speed and force of a WarioWare game, and perhaps the funniest thing of all is that each time Leximan swaps genres for the sake of a joke, it’s still actually really good.

Perhaps where Leximan lets itself down is in the moments where it suddenly decides to take itself seriously. Granted, these moments are few and far between, but when they do arrive they're deeply jarring - and not in the same entertaining way it shifts between different styles of game.

I also do think it's kind of a shame that central wordplay mechanic never really evolves beyond the initial concept. While it does remain a constant throughout various encounters and puzzles in between all the other bizarre nonsense Leximan has you do, it's hard not to feel like more could have been done with it, and that the exploration of other genres came at its expense.

I’ve never played anything quite like Leximan, and I’m not sure I ever will again. But I am hugely grateful a game this unashamedly silly exists, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a bit of a giggle.

Pros: Gleefully silly, incredibly imaginative, somehow nails every genre it approaches

Cons: Inconsistent writing, central mechanic could be more fleshed out

For fans of: Undertale, Monkey Island, Cryptmaster

Score: 8/10: Excellent

Leximan is available now on Steam. A code for review was supplied by the publisher. Find a complete guide to GAMINGbible's review scores here.