#cursed words

Is Imre boinking Crowny's father?

I’ve played a bunch of games in the past year that are (predictably, there’s a lot of them out there; it’s a fairly obvious twist so I don’t blame a bunch of devs for throwing their hats in the ring) all trying to be “Balatro, but with letters” and I think the one that’s grabbing me the most so far is Cursed Words because it goes far enough leaning into “wow, this really doesn’t resemble anything about what we started with, huh” but doesn’t just collapse into The One Best Strategy like Wordatro does.

make no mistake, Cursed Words does require you to be able to spell, but it also requires you to be willing to surrender to chaos, and at the end of the game you aren’t going to care much about spelling. With a lot of the characters, by the end of the game you literally will have no idea what word you’re spelling before it goes off because half of the game is based around using increasingly unhinged wildcard rules. This is good and expected. But yeah, eventually you’ll just be stringing together nine or ten wildcards while the game desperately tries to figure out what you “meant,” and of course you’ll be rolling in points as a result. Which, really, is kind of all we want from this kind of game sometimes.

I also like that the different characters feel super different, and while I’ve only tried a few of the challenge runs, they are plentiful and seem absolutely bastardly.