Leximan Reviews

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend Leximan. The core mechanic is basically that you build words from sets of letters in encounters to help resolve them. This is presented as being very creative, but usually there are only a few words you can make and even fewer that will progress or resolve the encounter. The choices made this way are also not really meaningful in most cases, usually just changing a single sprite in the overworld if that. You can also use the Lexicon to freely type words anywhere in the overworld to change the environment. While this also sounds like a cool mechanic, you don't learn that many words and it seems like a lot of the other interactions are guesswork or hidden very deeply in the game. I only found a few of these, but again the changes were relatively minor and they felt more like Easter eggs than anything else. Outside of the Lexicon encounters, the game is all over the place. The best way to describe it would be a series of minigames. Some of these were pretty amusing, others were just ok. Only one in particular was rough, mainly because of the weird controls/drift (the mail delivery minigame). The story is amusing but is mostly just an excuse for silliness and jokes. There's a neat twist at the end, but I think it's nothing to write home about. I did not like the mechanic where you have to view side character interactions to get the "true ending" because it doesn't give you any sense that you're making progress to unlocking them, and I only just barely managed it without giving up (I got two of them on accident, but the other two took me some time). Overall, even though I did finish this game I'd say the experience was average at best and undercooked at the worst, so to speak. There's a lot of charm in the game's characters and design but it feels like most of the effort went into that rather than designing the gameplay itself. I'd probably give it like 3 stars, but in a system where I can only recommend or not recommend it, I have to say that I don't recommend it.