Letterlike Review: a strategic word-building game

Ronald Lee | $3/£3

• Word jumbles with a roguelike structure
• Creative word-forming and plenty of depth
• Presentation and ‘game juice’ somewhat lacking

What do you get when you cross Scrabble with Balatro? Developer Ronald Lee clearly wants the answer to that question to be Letterlike.

While the game isn’t quite worthy of keeping company with such lofty reference points – few are – it certainly makes for one of the more interesting word games we’ve played in recent times.

Letterlike is a solo roguelike word jumble game that asks you to form words out of a small selection of random letters. Each letter is assigned a value, Scrabble-style, and there are extra points on offer for the size and nature of the word itself.

You have a limited number of words in which to attain a level-passing score, as well as limited opportunities to re-roll select letters to try and engineer a better word.

Fans of Balatro will see the clear influence here, and that continues with the end-of-round ‘boss’ battles that introduce random penalties, such as specific non-scoring letters. Also borrowed from Balatro is the ability to purchase word-enhancing bonus tiles in between rounds, making vowels count triple, increasing your discard allotment and so on.

It all works and plays nicely, but there’s a lack of finesse and polish to Letterlike that ultimately robs it of the compulsive gameplay loop that other roguelike games pull you into. For such static, ostensibly simplistic games as this, presentation is extremely important. Sadly, the little visual, audible, and tactile rewards that you might expect to get for unlocking a new tile or finishing a round are almost completely absent here.

Not only does the sparse nature of Letterlike’s presentation rob you of those crucial little dopamine hits, it also adversely affects the game’s readability. It can be tricky to parse what’s going on and where you are in a round, as there’s precious little visual differentiation between stages or even cards. A little too much tell, not enough show.

Word game fans shouldn’t let these presentational deficiencies put them off what is a mechanically sound game. There’s a real sense of progression here, if you stick at it, with a clear system in place to improve your runs permanently. It can be very addicting once you get the hang of it! The word nerds among you probably won’t be put off by a few too many rules to read, anyway.

If nothing else, Letterlike is an encouraging proof of concept. There’s clearly a great game to be made out of this roguelike word-building concept – if you fancy yourself an anagram hotshot, dive in for yourself to find out.