In the final game, I accepted I wasn’t enjoying myself. Inevitably, I would stare at the board for a long time before making a move. But each moment-to-moment snapshot is a puzzle in itself, one with no guarantee of solution. The player experiences rising panic, the feeling that the walls are closing in. Each move you make undermines your future – remember, those words you’re burning up can’t be used again. In fact, you don’t have to throw away half an hour before it gets serious – it’s bloody efficient in getting you to think. The more progress you make, the more tiles with minimum word length requirements appear. I found Rush mentally debilitating – stress killed my ability to divide attention between word hunting and managing towers. “Puzzle mode” adds a new row after each move while “Rush mode” is a race against time as a new row is added every few seconds. On Android, there are three single player modes (actually there’s four, but let’s just pretend expert mode doesn’t exist). It becomes crucial to attack the towers on the edges because they are harder to wear down. As you are more likely to form words from letters that have neighbours on both sides – simply because there are more possibilities available – what inevitably happens is that you build up tile debt on the edges of the screen. A word can only be used once to make a match and some letters come with minimum word length requirements. There are some twists to make the game even harder. Normally in this flavour of puzzle game the player is tasked to match tile colours but in Spelltower they must make words from the letters printed on the tiles to remove them.

Players must match tiles to clear space while the game keeps adding more to the board the game is over if the tiles reach the top. Some stupid people might argue a word game isn’t a puzzle but let’s ignore those people for now. Spelltower belongs to the special category of “word puzzle games” which are a world apart from your stereotypical abstract indie puzzler: the rules of language are knotted up with the rules of the game.

The game died in stasis.Īnd I came to the sobering conclusion that maybe I didn’t want it to be so hard. After, I think, a couple of weeks, I made the call. The last game I played kept going and going. Either my game was too short and unsatisfying or it was really long and taxing. I installed it on my Android, gave it a spin. It’s like the best word game, the best, I heard. This is the third part of The Ouroboros Sequence, a series on puzzle games.

Spelltower solver