unWorded (PC)

The English alphabet contains many simple shapes, making it little surprise when you find some object that contains something that looks like an O, L, or V. However, unWorded’s premise is that it aims to take things a step further, the puzzles you need to solve all about creating things purely from the letters of the alphabet. Despite basing its gameplay entirely around such an idea, it’s surprising how little imagination unWorded brings to the affair, stretching to include other elements of typography so it wouldn’t have to be quite as creative with its puzzle design.

In unWorded the player will need to create an object from a set of symbols that appear on screen, with “symbols” being the key word. Despite promising the idea of building objects from letters, you’ll find plenty of punctuation marks used as building blocks instead, the parenthesis in particular getting an incredible amount of play. Admittedly it is understandable that the game wouldn’t want to stretch the letter C out of its recognizable shape so it ropes in punctuation to serve as a lightly curved line, and with some punctuation like a question mark it still feels like its inclusion in a puzzle could lead to an interesting design. However, unWorded would much rather choose the simplest route to designing its challenges. Expect to see a lot of the simple letters like L reused frequently to make squares while the game does its best to avoid more challenging letters like G, and if the game was going to go for the easy route with its premise of using letters as building blocks, it’s a surprise that very few levels seem to have any inspired use for them. Perhaps even stranger is that it unafraid to contort some letters like T or D into different proportions, the puzzle where you make a globe having a shape that looks more like a plus sign with its bottom lopped off rather than a T.

unWorded’s willingness to stretch its shapes to make puzzles work rather than getting creative with how they can be put together isn’t just a failure of concept though. When the symbols are placed before you at level start, they’re often so simple that you can solve the puzzle immediately by dragging them into place without much thought. The fact there are sometimes only three or four symbols even late into the game definitely doesn’t help with making the item assembly interesting, and while you will sometimes have to use a simple item after making it like dragging a lightbulb around to light up areas of the screen or tipping a watering can to grow apple trees, that isn’t so much a gameplay challenge as something to do other than putting symbols in their proper place. One section of the game even makes this incredibly tedious as you need to guide a mine cart through a door maze where you are just picking paths, seeing where they go, and eventually figuring out through trial and error which one will take you out of the mine.

Perhaps more troublesome are the levels where putting the symbols in place isn’t easy, but that’s because the issue with these rarely emerges from failing to understand the puzzles. Fairly early on one of the puzzles is to arrange two parentheses and the letter I into a palm tree, something that sounds easy and can be so long as your particular simplified image of one lines up with what the developer envisioned. The shape of a bomb, the proportions of a hammer, or the orientation of a key can all be important to how you place the letters, and rather than this adding some layer of complexity to a puzzle, it mostly just means you start dragging the symbols around until the game accepts you were close enough to its intended version of the object. There’s another layer getting in your way of even identifying what you’re meant to be making too, that being each puzzle is introduced with a rhyming pair of sentences that are meant to indicate what you’re meant to be working on. Oftentimes it can be fairly direct such as the palm tree being called a “tropical tree” in the clue while other times you’ll need to look a little more closely at a sentence to suss out which word in particular might relate to the symbols before you. There are some mild successes with this formula, the puzzle sometimes slightly clever despite being easy to solve. One level with an abnormally long J and an L at an odd acute angle comes to mind for something that is nifty to see take shape with the other symbols despite the intention being obvious the moment you see the clue’s focus is on shopping, so while it is only a glimmer of the game’s potential, it’s better than the moments you’re breezing through things or fiddling with a symbol because the game wanted it lined up in a slightly different manner.

There is at least a hint system at play in unWorded if the game is really being ornery about accepting your input. However, this has a few of its own flaws as well. Early levels it can give direct advice by text, but later on it just starts highlighting parts of the clue used to determine the object you’re trying to make or marking the symbols in red that are misplaced. The highlighting of the symbols would actually be a fine way of showing you that something isn’t placed correctly if this hint actually worked the way it sounds. Instead, the game sometimes will tell you some objects are in the right place merely because they’ve connected with one symbol they’re meant to be touching. The game can paradoxically indicate that an issue exists with a piece that connects two other pieces that it touches while saying those are placed properly even though you’ll need to adjust all three to have the connections actually work. unWorded doesn’t seem to consider the orientation of the object in indicating if something is correct or incorrect either, so if you combine some pieces meant for the top and put them below other symbols, it might not alert you that the issue is you have the orientation backwards. Naturally this hint system is most likely to find most of its uses in the puzzles where your solution is right but placed a little awkwardly, and the confusing hints given unfortunately can throw you off the path of adjusting it just enough for the game to finally accept it.

The clues given to you for the puzzles are actually presented as part of a series of five story books. The game begins with tragedy as a children’s book author ends up in the hospital after an accident, but the game sort of gives away its narrative trajectory by naming its five story sections after the five stages of grief. The human story behind the puzzle solving is rather basic even without the spoiler inherent in the formulaic structuring, but each of the stages of grief has him bring up an old book he wrote during different points in his life. None of the stories are actually good as works of fiction and are just there to add context to a series of symbol arranging puzzles, but the premise of The Arms Dealer is interesting at least. The Arms Dealer book was his unpublished attempt at a mature story where a man ends falling in love with a woman who turns out to be an arms dealer, and while the story can’t explore the idea well, it could have been an engaging tale if told in a manner beyond puzzle clues. Instead, you’re more likely to get a repetitive story about a lonely handyman or a man who spends the whole story traveling through a mine than something memorable for its own writing.

In fact, the idea that these are mostly children’s books helps excuse the low quality of the rhymes featured in the writing. Rather than having clever construction or poetic language choice, the puzzle clues all are written with the utilitarian bent that kid’s stories often employ to push their simple narratives along. For example, “His plants would become his greatest work, He chose them with care and never a shirk” is a clear case of forcing the rhyme for a section where you need to pick the right apples to progress the story. The weird thing about so much of the game being built around these juvenile rhymes is that the main plot outside of the pages of the books details a man clinging to life and even lashing out at the people he loves, so while they do prioritize their role in giving instruction on what object to make or how to use it after its made, it leads to a very strange overall tone for the game that makes it hard to care about any of the tales being told.

THE VERDICT: While building objects out of the alphabet could have been a neat concept, unWorded’s lazy approach to designing its puzzles is certainly not OK. Twisting and distorting the simplest shapes of the alphabet while including punctuation marks where such an approach wouldn’t work is one thing, but so many of the puzzles can be completed instantly because of their simplicity and the harder ones mostly come from the player and the game having different ideas on how to make the same object. The tonal mismatch of a narrative that bounces between a cliche story of grief and children’s stories written with bland rhymes means there’s nothing to latch onto besides the rare puzzle where the way letters come together can be a little bit nifty.

And so, I give unWorded for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. Even once you adjust your expectations the moment you see the game resort to punctuation marks and oddly shaped letters, unWorded still lacks the creative spark required to bring even its slightly stretched concept to life. When the most challenging puzzles are ones where you are struggling to get the game to recognize you’re making what it requested of you, the few where something is a little clever or cute are hardly going to make up for the frustrating portions. unWorded definitely limited itself with its need to distort all of its puzzle designs in a way that it matches the narrative, the low quality rhymes and generic plot about grief not worth sabotaging the enjoyability of the symbol arranging gameplay. There’s an overall lack of ambition as the game avoids challenging letter shapes and tries to keep the level of symbols necessary per level very low. If it had been more daring or creative unWorded could at least offer puzzles where you nod in acknowledgement at a clever symbol arrangement, but instead the easier puzzles breeze by without an impact and the ones that do stand out do so because of some annoying aspect or lack of imagination.

unWorded barely dodges getting an F, but that doesn’t mean it earns a passing letter grade either. Most time spent talking about unWorded won’t be about how thankfully some puzzles go by quickly so they’re not annoying or a random idea might be a little amusing. If you’re going to talk about unWorded, it will likely be to bring up the squandered premise, the confused tone, or the fact it fails to provide the kind of puzzles that demand a level of cleverness or problem solving skill to complete.