The big brains behind TimeSplitters and GoldenEye are breaking into the Balatro business with Beyond Words

Original TimeSplitters and GoldenEye developers David Doak and Steve Ellis person reunited to marque - oh, those scalliwags, you're going to emotion this - a roguelike connection puzzler called Beyond Words, which is being billed arsenic "Balatro meets Scrabble".

That punctuation is really from Time Extension, but publishers PQube person reprinted it ecstatically successful the announcement release, and well, travel on, look astatine it. Watch the trailer below. If this crippled wasn't inspired by Balatro, I volition devour an existent Scrabble board, mossy greenish bags and all. Then I volition crap a match-winning seven-letter connection of mild approval, similar "quality". I bash similar Scrabble, adjacent erstwhile it has 300+ modifiers successful it and immoderate perchance AI-generated polar bears.

You tin find a demo for Beyond Words connected Steam. If you click done and play that demo, I volition not person to explicate the crippled immoderate further, and tin prevention my precious high-scoring words for different breaking quality stories, similar immoderate the hellhole Tim Sweeney has said now. But no, I spot that you are inactive reading, due to the fact that you are excessively overmuch successful thrall to words. Friend, I tin lone salute your lexophilia. Here is different paragraph, specially for you.

As successful Scrabble, the extremity successful Beyond Words is to signifier your manus of missive tiles into high-scoring words. But this ain't the accepted Scrabble layout, with those wily triple-word bonus squares successful the acold corners. There's a enactment of boards, aka "living puzzles". Some of them look similar Zelda dungeons aft a pinch of chemoreceptor candy, sprinkled with golden coins and barricades and power-up signs.

This isn't the accepted Scrabble scoring system, either: you tin alteration missive scores, duplicate them and destruct them. You tin "bend the rules past breaking constituent with modifiers, stickers, and enhancements wherever each prime shapes your journey". There are besides clip onslaught challenges, brag battles, seeded runs and "the brain-melting flipside of antagonistic scoring". If you play the demo, delight get backmost to america to corroborate whether your encephalon has melted - I'm rather attached to my encephalon and would alternatively not hazard it.

Beyond Words is owed successful aboriginal entree successful aboriginal 2026. The Steam leafage carries the disclosure that "generative AI was 1 of galore tools utilized by nonrecreational artists to assistance successful the instauration of the artwork for the game". I person to constitute up Sweeney's latest adjacent truthful I'll prevention today's torch-waving excoriations astir generative AI usage for that post.

The tribunal dutifully acknowledges that this is not the archetypal clip somebody's spilled Balatro implicit Scrabble - there's besides Letterlike and Word Play, astatine the precise least. If you'd alternatively play immoderate benignant of first-person shooter with N64 oregon PS2 graphics, possibly cheque retired loving fangame TimeSplitters: Rewind.