izigame.me

It is good, just not good enough
I get what the developers are going for and commend them for their hard work and novel idea. However, there is not much meat on this bone. For the 25 USD price point the game has not met my expectations. Combat is lacking, some mechanics are straight up bad and should be removed, and the game can soft lock you repeatedly during random encounters
The 'Wordle' part
The setup of the game is simple. You type words to execute an action or attack. You find new actions or attacks by revealing words one at the time per character. The way the game helps you discover the words is through combat, which reveals 1 letter you choose, or through riddles, where the letters in the answer will apply to all of the characters speeding up the discovery proces.
Combat
The combat is based on the player typing these discovered words.
- One of the main gripes I have with combat is the cooldown mechanic. It completely removes the player's typing speed from the combat skill equation: How fast you can type only matters at the initial attacks, after that you just line up the words and hit enter after the character's cooldown expires.
- There is also not a lot of variety in attacks between characters
- Some words (like salmon or urchins) do the same thing on the same character.
- The overview of all the unlocked 'words' (i.e. attacks) mixes the important attack words with other useless 'memory' words that have no use throughout the game
- Enemies have a shield that can soft lock you (You unlock crack early on in the game for jorro. If the shield enemies have armor you need to crack before being able to do damage. An enemy shield that states any of the letters that are used in the word can counter it, making it so you can't progress and just have to wait for your party to die.
- The armor mechanic also makes heavy hitting attacks much less useful, as you have to remove the armor before being able to deal more damage. So knowing puppet, rattle or cackle (which are all, again, stacked on the same character) often does little
Exploring
The exploring gets old quickly. All areas start to look the same. Rocks, grass, a wooden door and rampart. It never really changes. The black and white visuals do little to redeem this and perhaps even add to the repetitive look of the dungeon. The rooms you will explore can be quite big. As a dungeon crawler it makes sense you want to explore these rooms, but the game does nothing to reward you for it. You can waste a lot of time navigating all the nooks and crannies of the map, expecting perhaps a chest or puzzle, but instead be rewarded with more black and white walls.
Puzzles and Riddles
The riddles are great and are a nice addition to the game. The mental switch from 'Wordle Dungeon Crawler' to solving riddles is fun and feels good. Not all riddles are equal though, some are unoriginal and you've probably heard before many times whereas others are quite clever and new. The one thing they completely messed up is that not all riddles have the correct answer.
Early on the game acknowledges this in the tombs. The riddle What has an eye but cannot see can be given multiple answers and the NPC will reply with I did not expect that particular answer but it is also correct so here is your prize. You can answer blind, needle or storm and all will be true and counted as such.
Later in the game this completely goes away. For example the riddle What do you have but never use, and others use all the time requires the answer name, but a) you do use your name to introduce yourself and In that case something akin to 'your reputation' should also fit. Or Your phone number . There are many riddles that can be given multiple answers to in this game and I was hoping, due to the core mechanic being trial and error inputting words, the game would accommodate this throughout the game.
This makes solving riddles much more frustrating and less fun. It makes it feel abitrary. It highlights the fact that the 'dungeon master' that you interact with has much more limited interactions than you'd expect at first.
The game also has a big difficulty spike at Ulara castle when it comes to riddles. There is one where you straight up need create an algebraic function and solve it . It makes the pacing feel weird and the new area feel like a brick wall which I am sure will discourage a lot of players. You can have the narrator literally give you the answer after 1 or 2 tries, but for a game about solving riddles, where is the fun in that.

The story
You are probably not buying this for the story but rather for the gameplay mechanics described above. If you mainly want a good dungeon crawler story, this is not the game for you. The characters in this story are weak and interchangeable. Your party of heroes consist of mutes. The game tells you to talk to NPCs and interact with them using action keywords like 'talk', 'use' or anything contextual. But 90% of the time you can't talk to the NPCs and the dungeon master gives you the same reply again and again. 'You will talk when I will tell you to' as you roll your eyes and move towards the next door on your map. The fun and interesting parts in the story are few and far between.
Conclusion
The game has an insane amount of potential. It just needs a lot more polish and more thought into the design elements of the game. The gameplay loop could use a review. The combat needs a complete overhaul that caters more towards typing fast while remembering the words you unlocked, removing the cooldowns or making them much shorter will be a great start. Currently the game to me is a 4 or 5 out of 10 because of the reasons mentioned above. With some more TLC it can be a 7 or 8.