Words of Yendor Reviews

Odd game. Tries to build on top of Scrabble as a foundation, but the result is overly complex and not fun for me. I applaud the attempt to make something different and this could have potential, but focus more on logic, fun, and simplicity. More playtesting and feedback from different types of gamers could help a sequel for this.

TLDR: If you like words games, I highly recommend the game. It's well done and fun. Words of Yendor - is a dungeon crawler with word games. The emphasis is on words, even though there are slay-the-spire-esque mechanics like visiting events, healing, shops, equipping artifacts, using consumables etc. However, the way it's all done is very unique. You begin with character creation: there are plenty of visual options for avatar, which is a nice touch. Then you choose one of several presets, which would allocate you a certain amount of consumables and artifacts, as well as define your starting dueling and scouting stats. Actually, even prior to that, you choose the length of a run (from 3 to 12) You go through a "dungeon" with several paths to choose, however only the first one is known, the other 1 or 2 are hidden and in order to find out the nature of these encounters, you need to scout them first. This is the first mini-game which consists of a collection of letters thrown into a grid and you need to construct a word by connecting letters horizontally or vertically. AI does that too (usually it's word is covered), then the word is revealed and if your scores higher, you succeed in scouting as well as receive some minor rewards. Then you have a classic hangman game. You get these from encounters and technically can complete a run without ever visiting one. The cool part is that it entails not only guessing singular words, but sometimes also whole parts of known poems and literary works. Nice! Another common type of encounter is a duel. There you are given letters to form words: the "harder" the letter, the higher is your score. Then you both deal damage to each other depending on the score. This was the most fun part of the game for me: you are basically constrained only by your vocabulary and coming up with the longest and strongest word is so enjoyable :) The whole run is segregated into different parts (towns), with a duel at the end of each one. Once you win the duel, you proceed to a showdown. Mystery words are written in a grid and the letters are moved around so you can't figure out right away what the words are. Each letter is colored depending on whether it's right where it should be, is in the right row OR column, or neither of those. You swap two letters at a time to arrange all the letters in proper spots, the limitations being the amount of experience and clues you have (which you get for winning scouting, duels or from encounters). Once those are depleted, you start losing health. Then - to the next town, with another duel at the end and another showdown, however the words you guessed in previous showdowns are already known, with a couple more added on top. Rinse and repeat, until you find all the words at showdown events - and this is the length of the run you choose at the start: from 3 words to 12. Might sound convoluted, but you get the grasp of things pretty quickly. However, this is not all: the game is very flavorful for "just" a word game: each encounter is accompanied with a short story, describing the happenings. And that is not all, I won't reveal everything but trust me: the developer has put quite some work in world building and this enhanced the experience quite a bit. Personally, I just love word games, but good flavor goes a long way. Despite that, it's not THAT deep and after a few runs I stopped reading most of things simply because I've already read all there is to it. One of the mechanics of the game is Bierce words: a predetermined list of words, which scores in duels are doubled. You don't know these words at the beginning and discovering new ones was a fun experience. These words are not random: they are separated into two lists according to their flavor and using any of these words in combat increases your allegiance score with one of two fractions, which might give you benefits in special events. However, the downside is that then you are being chased by an assassin: a hard duel, where an opponent will bombard you with strong words (sometimes bierce ones too). The game is filled with these little mechanics and interactions - enjoyed it a lot. From technical standpoint I had no complaints, which was a very pleasant surprise. Looking through reviews of various tabletop and word games on steam I frequently found that oftentimes the final product was very rough: things not working, interface being unintuitive, bugs etc. Don't know what it is about these types of games, that leads to such result. Maybe my sample was biased and I'm completely off on that. Well, Words of Yendor was a very smooth experience. Encountered zero bugs, the graphics is soft and pleasing to the eye, the music is appropriate and unobtrusive. Never was softlocked: all the puzzles were solvable. The only minor point is I think the artifacts in inventory should be graphically represented as icons, probably somewhere on top of screen similar to slay the spire. Even though you don't often carry many, I often forget which ones I have and for that you need to select your inventory and then click in the dropdown menu of a specific artifact, because of course you forget what they do at the beginning. You do have consumables visually represented as various gadgets, potions and such on the left of the screen and I think this helps with gameplay a lot: simply having that info in front of your eyes. This might be unnecessary, because artifacts do not carry as big of a role as in other dungeon crawlers, but still. As a full-achievements enjoyer, getting all achievements was natural and didn't take too much extra time on top of main gameplay. Completing each run length from 3 to 12 took about 20 hours. The other 5 I spent chasing the remaining few achievements and even though some of them include rng, due to the amount of places during a run where you can roll for them being relatively high, I didn't feel any frustration in getting those. The 100% process was organic and also made me play a bit more, which is nice since I enjoyed the game quite a lot. Also, I didn't know how to get the last three achievements, so I asked in the forums and the dev has provided a very detailed response, which helped me substantially: got two of the three right away during my first run after the response=) Words of Yendor is very well done for what it aims to do and I would certainly recommend it to any fan of word games. I certainly look forward to other games from the developer. Thank you and good luck ;)