Beyond Words review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch

Beyond Words should, in theory, be right up my alley. It essentially sells itself as Scrabble-meets-Balatro. I love word games. I love roguelike deckbuilders. While the whole “Balatro-meets-X” is pretty hit or miss as a genre (with a lot more misses than hits at this point), the fact that Beyond Words was made by veteran developers who created GoldenEye & TimeSplitters should make this a sure thing…right?

As you can probably tell from the tone of that intro, I’m not as in love with Beyond Words as you might think. Part of this is because other word games have adapted the Balatro formula to their model much more successfully than Beyond Words does. Birdigo, for example, is an excellent roguelike deckbuilder that just so happens to be about building words. Wordatro is another one, which is even closer in spirit to Balatro while still carving out a niche of its own. Beyond Words feels a little late to the party when you consider those games (and other, much lesser ones) already do what it wants to do.

However, my other, bigger issue with Beyond Words is that it tries to apply the “Oooh, big numbers!” formula to a game like Scrabble without seeming to understand what’s made Scrabble so enduring. Beyond Words feels like Scrabble remade by someone who’s never really played it.

This may seem surprising if you just go by the screenshots. After all, Beyond Words gives you a board, and there are multipliers, and you need to get as many points as possible – all elements of Scrabble, to be sure.

But there are also significant differences that make Beyond Words less fun. For starters, the board is a lot smaller. This, in turn, means that your words need to be a lot shorter, since it also means that you full the space up a lot more quickly – yet, at the same time, the point requirements to pass each level get exponentially higher each time, so where you need to score 100 points the first level, it’s not long before your words need to score 10,000 points, or 50,000 points, or 100,000 points or more. This means that rather than testing your vocabulary, Beyond Words is really a test of how well you can maximize combos.

To be sure, that’s part of Scrabble too – anyone who’s ever watched a really good Scrabble player knows that it’s not just having a big vocabulary, it’s also foregoing longer words in favour of words that maximize points via well-placed double- and triple-word and letter spots. But at the same time, a big part of Scrabble is also scratching out those last few points near the end of a game when the board is crowded and you’re forced to play 2- and 3-letter words that are only worth handful of points – whereas in Beyond Words, that’s when the game expects you to really go all out and get the biggest words and the most points possible. It means the game rewards you for playing conservatively for as long as possible, so that you keep your options open for later in the game when you need to bust out big – and big-scoring – words.

Even now, writing it all out like that, I feel like I should have enjoyed Beyond Words a lot more than I did. And I did enjoy it, to some extent – it’s still a game where you get to spell out words, which isn’t something I’ll ever get bored of doing. But there are much better examples of roguelike deckbuilder word games that do something new and interesting and unique, and I’d much rather play those games than this one.

PQube provided us with a Beyond Words PC code for review purposes.