About a year ago I decided I wanted to increase the speed of
my typing and bought some typing games off Steam. The week before last, I decided
to play one of them: God of Word, mainly because I wanted to be able to play something
on my laptop without having to plug in my mouse!
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| What's the longest word you can make here? |
God of Word is a word game where the main objective is to
make a 3-7 letter word out of the given letters. This central mechanic is
nothing that we haven’t been playing in our internet browsers for the last
twenty years or so, but what sets this one apart is that it’s set in Ancient Greece,
as a kind of paper puppet theatre set-up. The idea is that you’re a messenger –
not Hermes, but probably a disciple of his – and you’re telling the story of
how you journeyed from one side of the country to the other, delivering
messages and battling monsters.
Each stage has a few different enemies and monsters for you
to fight, and you have a set amount of time to beat them. To beat them, you must
type your words in to build up your attack; you need to build a certain number
of points and your letters score points based on their counterparts in
Scrabble. Larger words are worth more points and do more damage. You can press
tab to re-arrange the letters, and space to draw a new set of letters – but at
the cost of around 10 seconds of time. It’s simple enough, and if that was all
there was to it, God of Word probably wouldn’t be interesting. But the game
deploys bonus tiles from time to time to offer you more incentives for using
those letters: Red ones do more damage, yellow ones give you more time, blue
ones give you more renown (experience, I think,) and gold ones give you, well,
gold.
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| You won't be using that E for a minute or two... |
Ah yes, gold and experience. God of Word also provides the lightest
of role-playing game elements, by assigning experience points to increase your
character’s attributes (that give you more time, increase your damage, etc) and
at certain milestones in the game you can also buy more equipment. Better
weapons do more damage and can have additional effects, and better armour gives
you more time. It is necessary to do this to keep up with the way the game
increases in difficulty as you progress, but it gives you some agency over which
attributes to increase which builds your engagement.
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I wonder what the remaining letter
could possibly be... |
God of Word also manages to provide some variety in the
levels. Every so often there is a “hangman” style minigame, where you have a
certain number of guesses to spell a word and rescue a follower – but take too
many guesses and they will die. The game has boss battles as well, which tend
to work in one of two ways: In one way the game works as normal but with extra
stipulations on the tiles. In the Medusa battle, for example, a letter will
turn to stone if you don’t use it quickly enough, and it will take a while
before you can use that letter again. The other way is a word blast, which has
a couple of modes as well – either monsters or hazards come flying at you and
will kill you if they reach you, or you have a certain unspecified amount of
time to type a certain number of words before you die. These require some quick
typing and some of them are hard – the Sirens took me a while!
This is an indie game built in the Unity engine, and while
it lacks a certain amount of polish, it’s competently made. The graphics boast
a distinctive art style; you either like it or you don’t, but it does what it
needs to do. The sound is good as well, nothing to write home about but the
effects are all in the right places and the music sounds epic enough (if a
little anachronistic for the time period it depicts, but hey, most things are!)
God of Word won’t change the world, but it’s a fun game to pick
up and play – and get lost in.
Final Score: 3/5: Worth a Look
