Recent reviews by FoxSylv

Disclosure: I was one of the beta testers and received the game for free.

If you like Balatro and/or word games, I think you'd find OMG Words very enjoyable. There is a tremendous skill ceiling behind the simple-looking game, with many many ways to use and combo what the game offers to you. I personally really enjoy the game and the depth it gives, and recommend you check this out if you think it'll interest you ^w^

Letter Quest is a game that seems to take heavy influence from the classic Popcap game "Bookworm Adventures", albeit with more RPG elements. As the current #1 Expert Any% speedrun record holder and a former top 10 Bookworm speedrunner, there are several unique perspectives that I think are worth mentioning:

GAMEPLAY
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I personally really like the gameplay. It's very fun to spell words, and slowly building up your power through the gem upgrades to match your playstyle is extremely rewarding (some upgrades are much more powerful than others, though). I especially love the gem piles at the end of each level, since they are a small extra bonus that rewards skill and thinking things through. It's just a big enough bonus where it feels worthwhile, without the pressure of feeling required to shuffle until you find a big enough word for a good reward.

Similarly, I really like the shops that appear in the middle of levels, since they reward tactical decision making with powerups and give the user a definite choice. I do feel like you could do more with the hangman-esque puzzles (like say, having a higher reward for fewer wrong guesses), but it's a fun break, and is an additional bonus for people who want to go for it.

I wish there were more variety in enemies and attacks, though. Currently, there's only a handful of enemies (with different difficulty tiers, which I personally find super cool), and fighting them gets repetitive quite fast. The various side levels and the challenge modes of levels helps to alleviate this, but the small pool of enemies is a pretty massive flaw with the game. But there's still, a bigger issue:


RNG
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The game is about spelling letters, and thus you're necessarily dependent on whatever letters you get. But one thing this game suffers from is that you can get completely steamrolled with bad letters far far too easily. There have been many times where I spell a word, and I get over four of one same tile in return, or have one, two, or even ZERO vowels reappear in the new board, and I'm forced to lose a turn shuffling the board through no fault of my own. On occasion, it's just bad luck, but when it happens multiple times per stage, it is just frustrating. Compound this with tile effects that severely limit or remove possible tiles from play without spamming purify potions, and you very often need to shuffle and lose a turn, or even just die, simply because you got moderately unlucky.

This is especially infuriating because when you shuffle, you lose all the gems on the board. Gems give boosts for three turns, and some of them are way way way better than others. The difference between the best gems and the worst ones is either dying on the second enemy or finishing the stage with full health. And once again, when you get gems, and whether they are good or not is entirely random. So if you play the same stage repeatedly, even if all the words you spell and tiles you get are the same, the gems you get radically change the actual outcome you get, completely outside of your control.

All this compounds in certain stages where you need very specific types of words to actually deal an appreciable amount of damage. For example, the final boss takes 5x damage from words containing E and S, and their health bar is increased in accordance with this bonus. But the resulting gameplay is: "Frantically shuffle over and over until you get a board that actually deals damage, and pray you get defensive gems so that you dont die". This is an exceedingly annoying experience.

So overall, while the RNG is fine if you are only playing extremely casually, if you try to do well in the game in the slightest, it becomes an absolute *nightmare*. And even casually, there are many times where you feel completely at the mercy of randomness.


CONCLUSION
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The plot is not the focus of this game; the spelling and RPG elements are. Letter Quest is a fun game for people who like spelling, and the cute atmosphere makes it a good family game as well. So long as you don't take the game too seriously, it's a fantastic play, and I would highly recommend.