Margot's Word Brain Reviews

Margot's Word Brain is an ancient game from 2008. It's a whopping 16 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. This is a bargain bin reject abandonware word puzzle game. Connect the letters to make as many words as you can before the timer runs out! That's all there is to it. This is the kind of thing you can play for free in a web browser or on mobile phones, so there's absolutely no justification for the developer charging money for this abandoned trash on Steam. It's a weird business model to compete with the puzzle section at the back of the newspaper. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006. It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static images... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Margot's Word Brain is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $3 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Timers (with time not changeable - the game has no options) combined with slightly laggy mouse input (including mouse movement - needed to move to other letters), make this game - which can't be resized - and which has no difficulties to choose from, fairly unplayable & very unfulfilling. Also uses some VERY obscure words - Maguey and Drupes, anyone? (I feel this would be okay in the hardest difficulty setting, if it had them - but not in the default/only difficulty) Unless the game gets updated with timer settings & difficulty added, Avoid!