Letterlike review for PC

As a devoted word game aficionado, Letterlike seemed like it’d be right up my alley. It’s essentially a roguelike deckbuilder version of Scrabble, where you’re trying to augment your score with multipliers, upgrades, and different bags of letters. Think Balatro, but for word nerds.

Unfortunately, Letterlike doesn’t quite match the highs of Balatro. It certainly makes an effort, though. The basic gameplay is obviously very easy to pick up: if you’ve ever played Scrabble, you’ll know what you’re doing here. You draw seven tiles, you play a word, you try to outscore your opponent – that part is all pretty straightforward.

Where things fall apart is when it gets more complicated than that. While your first couple of opponents are pretty easy, once you get to the third or fourth opponent the game seems to verge on the impossible. You can buy multipliers and extra letter spots, but even with 3x and 4x multipliers, I was still only getting to 5-6,000 points – nowhere near the 10,000 points needed to get to the next round.

Part of the issue, I think, is that Letterlike comes only with the most basic tutorial imaginable. While it tells you how to play words, it skimps on the details when it comes to using multipliers, which means you’re basically on your own while you grind your way to loss after loss after loss.

The other issue is that word games don’t lend themselves to deckbuilder roguelikes in the same way that poker lends itself to a game like Balatro. While there are millions of possible poker hands, the number of winning combinations is much smaller so you can play with a couple of intended outcomes in mind. By contrast, English has hundreds of thousands of words and, at least in Letterlike, it’s a lot harder to aim for something specific – and that’s especially true when you have a massive pool of letters and a limited number of redraws for each game. Case in point, I drew a hand with no vowels, so I was forced to trade a bunch of consonants in – only for me to wind up with a pair of consonants and something like 5 Es, none of which combined to form a word that was longer than two or three letters.

The annoying thing is that Letterlike feels so close to getting it right. There’s a great idea here, and I suspect that with a bit more balancing the game will get there – but at this point, it’s not quite there yet.

Puzzlelike provided us with a Letterlike PC code for review purposes.