unWorded review

Developer: Bento

Price: $3.99
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2

Graphics/Sound Rating:
User Interface Rating:
Gameplay Rating:
Replay Value Rating:

Overall Rating:

unWorded is an adventure/puzzle game where you must take hints from bits of text to create images out of typographic symbols. It's a really clever game that takes its concepts and pushes them in new and interesting directions without ever feeling like things get too vague or difficult, all while telling an emotionally powerful story.

Puzzle and prose

As a game all about words, unWorded uses them as a narrative device and to create puzzles you're supposed to solve. In this story, you play as an author who has found themselves in a pretty unfortunate situation as you revisit your past works. To make progress in the game, you'll have to illustrate scenes from your stories using a few typographical symbols like letters and punctuation marks.

This intertwining of puzzle-solving and narrative really helps unWorded feel unique while also giving players a compelling reason to press on in the game.

Make a word picture

The core of unWorded's gameplay is in rearranging letters and symbols to create pictures. This starts out simply enough by asking you to make things like umbrellas and trees with 2-3 objects, but evolves into much more complicated images that involve more intricate layering of your pieces.

To keep you from getting stumped, unWorded provides a few clever hint systems so you never really feel completely helpless. The first is in the words that hang above each puzzle, which serve both as snippets of a story as well as the description of the scene you're supposed to be making. If that's not quite enough of a hint, there's also a question mark button in the corner of the screen that highlights key words in the story any pieces that you don't seem to be using the right way. These systems both really alleviate the frustration that you might experience with other games that are less-than-helpful about their puzzle solutions.

The power of words

As neat as unWorded is, it does occasionally overreach in its puzzle design. At certain times, the picture you are being asked to make feels like it could be made in more than one way, and the game unfortunately does not recognize alternative illustrations. Also, some puzzles later in the game go to some strange places that do not stick to the strengths of unWorded's core mechanics.

In the end though, these issues speak more to the ambition of unWorded than anything else, and it's easy to look past them thanks to the hint system.

The bottom line

unWorded is a surprisingly creative game both in terms of its story and puzzle design. Even though it throws some unclear and weird puzzles at you sometimes, unWorded is absolutely worth playing.