Word Search 10K (3DS)
Word Search 10K has what sounds like an intriguing premise. Rather than completing word searches across a multitude of puzzles, it instead provides one gigantic word search to complete. Of course, finding 10,000 words in a jumble of nearly 100,000 letters would be overwhelming, so there are some ideas in place to make it manageable like having words remain specific to different sections of the enormous puzzle. However, as one begins to play, some cracks in the concept slowly reveal themselves as well as technical issues that shouldn’t even exist.
With quiet classical music backing your work, Word Search 10K only has the goal of finding every word in its huge arrangement of letters. Using the d-pad or control stick you can move your window of the massive word search around, the dimensions usually around 12 letters vertically and 16 letters horizontally, but one of the first issues you’ll encounter actually ties into this display method. While you are searching an area for the words you’ll be encircling via the touch screen, a box on the top screen displays every word that has at least one of its letters on screen. This does mean technically you’ll only have relevant words to search for, but the display doesn’t move around perfectly. If even a pixel of the next column or row is on screen, it will believe that word is visible and put it in the word bank, meaning you can be searching for something you can’t even see. This gets a bit worse when you consider the odd technical issues Word Search 10K has, the game sometimes not displaying a column of letters even once you have scrolled far enough over it should be visible. This blank column problem becomes more likely to happen the longer you play, a few other issues also cropping up the longer you have the game on. For example, the scrolling around the massive word search is at first smooth and zippy, but over time it becomes rather sluggish and stutters as it seems to have issues loading in the letters you’re moving towards. In fact, it is even possible for the player to pause and be unable to exit the pause menu, but many of these technical issues are rectifiable by turning the game off and back on again, progress thankfully saved after every word you find.
The giant word search is split into smaller color-coded segments with different topics per word cluster. A word cluster is larger than what can be displayed on screen, meaning that a section of the word search can include a large amount of terms to find. Usually a section contains somewhere between 80 and 120 words to find, and with 100 individual sections this variable range means certain subjects can be more robust if they have smaller words or can pack in longer search terms if need be. A word has to be able to be fully displayed on screen for you to circle it though, so that does mean relevant phrases might be broken into separate search targets. For example, a section devoted to the rock band Green Day has “Boulevard” and “BrokenDreams” in different parts of its section but fans of the band would still know what those terms are referencing. The word selection can certainly get at odd at times though, possibly because of the words being presented in isolation for you to find. It’s hard to say why the word “Useless” is included among a selection of words related to Egypt without whatever mental context the puzzle creators had for including it. However, there is a good range of topics covered across the 100 provided. Some are broad ideas like summer activities or holiday accoutrements while others focus in on very specific media like words related to the television show NCIS or the book series Discworld. For the most part it won’t really matter if the topic interests you since they’re just words to find in a letter jumble, but a rather poor idea was pursued with a section called “Itsy Bitsy Spider” where all the words are scientific names for spiders. Their unusual yet specific spelling means you’ll need to consistently consult the word bank to try and internalize the strange names… or you can just cotton on that they all end in “dae” and use that as a bit of a cheat to find words in reverse. Whether it’s a too easy or too difficult section, it is thankfully an outlier, although the game does have some rather unimaginative sections.
Four letter words, five letter words, and six letter words all have their own subject square and these can even reach over 200 terms. Already this massive word search surprisingly enough has an issue with almost every letter on the board being part of a word you’re looking for, but these sections are packed even tighter than others. One interesting element though to make this more than a bunch of word squares stitched together is that terms can spill over into other sections, usually a few from each section doing so in some capacity. Naturally, words can already share letters with each other, although there is a weird case where the word “Pajamas” and “RedPajamas” are in the same section and you end up circling one word that is entirely within another. This is at least better than the occasional issue where a word you’re meant to find can appear through random letter mixing but doesn’t count when you circle it. This is admittedly rare, and while different sections may repeat a word found in another one, you can still circle both just fine. In the section devoted to Taylor Swift songs though, the word “Revenge” needs to be found on its own. You can find one instance of it connected to another term, “Nevermind”, but if you circle it, it does not count, and the earlier “Pajamas” situation shows that letter sharing is not an issue so there’s no explanation for this problem. The actual “Revenge” you’re meant to find is close by, but that almost makes it stranger that such an issue wasn’t noticed and corrected.
As you move around the giant word search, finding words related to dog breeds, k-pop performers, Star Trek, male athletes, and movies starring Whoopi Goldberg, the word selections might not seem too strange even if you think there might have been better terms to highlight, but there are some legitimately strange choices best exemplified by the section on the video game series Sonic the Hedgehog. While it includes many of the expected characters and game mechanics from across its history, you might at first be tickled to find it also includes a few terms related to the short-lived animated series Sonic Underground. However, soon you’ll also notice this section is populated with an unusually high amount of names for real life people, and while the series does feature a few notable creators and performers, the selections get oddly specific and start to feel like someone just scanned a credits section and plucked out a few names. It is quite likely for certain topics that the words were chosen by someone just looking up the topic and grabbing keywords without context rather than being familiar with the work. This might explain the occasional typo as well, such as the Pokemon section spelling Mienfoo as “Meinfoo”. The good news is, the typo is consistent between the word bank and what you’re meant to find, but it’s another area where the game comes up short despite not exactly having a very demanding concept on its hands.
The funny thing about the many little issues you can find with Word Search 10L’s execution is… it’s still a word search at the end of the day. There are times where you are just happily circling words you find without really rubbing up against the issues too much, and there are at least a few ideas in place to make the task more manageable. You can press A to open an Overview menu that shows every subject box, letting you teleport over to that section if you so wish. This screen also tells you how many words there are to find in that section, how many you have found, and a percentage score to make it clear how much progress in that area has been made, a gold star eventually filling it once you’ve found every word for that subject. It’s actually fairly likely many people who would play this game will not even get near to 1,000 words found, this more a casual game to pop open and play for a bit where they won’t really notice the little incongruities and they might turn it off before the technical issues kick in (although they can kick in surprisingly quickly at times). Little annoyances like the problems with populating the word bank might not get noticed if someone isn’t really committed to completing it all, a quick dabble in the concept likely to provide something close to the normal simple fun word searches provide. This doesn’t redeem the game of course, but the impact of an individual issue is often minor and for some people it might not even appear on their radar. Still, it is a bit baffling how the game can bungle what should have been an easy enough concept to execute, so it won’t receive a pass just because some players might only have a short casual interest in it.
THE VERDICT: Word Search 10K had one job: make one giant word search filled 10,000 words to find. However, it has unusual technical issues the longer you play something that will take a good amount of time to complete, it has issues like typos and search terms that can appear but won’t count if circled, and some of its word selections for a specific subject feel impersonal and selected by someone with little knowledge of the topic. You still can play it like a normal word search at times and it has a few helpful ideas in place like the overview screen, but many small issues add up to a word search game that is better off not started at all.
And so, I give Word Search 10K for Nintendo 3DS…
A BAD rating. Again, a good deal of accentuating the negative occurred here, but for good reason. While you can find some times where you can happily search an area for some words, find them with just enough challenge, and you may even have some interest in the particular subject it’s covering, there are unusual barriers to making this a smooth experience. It is a bit strange the game has loading issues at all, the scope of what it shows at any one time small and letters aren’t exactly a very demanding type of data. If you don’t frequently reset the game, you’ll sluggishly move the screen to get to new areas and sometimes the letters on the borders won’t display right or aren’t even really visible and yet they influence the word bank. The word bank population issues are the most likely problem to impact even casual players and something that really shouldn’t be cropping up in a game where it’s pretty important that the player knows exactly what they can find in an area. The “4 Letter Words” section contains 248 terms to find and they frequently cross into each other, and with such small words and frequent overlap, you can waste a lot of time scouring every letter on screen only to learn it actually wasn’t on screen at all. The scrolling can at least be used as a trick sometimes to help you, the moment a word disappears from the word bank you know you’ve scrolled away from wherever it appears, but too many little nuisances make this already massive challenge unnecessarily rickety and a slog at parts. To clean it up would require some better proofreading to avoid issues like the “Revenge” problem, a selection of subjects the developer knew better to avoid making a subject less appealing for those who actually recognize the topic, and of course some better coding. There is no reason a 3DS should struggle with a word search game, even one of this size, and some ideas like erring on the side of caution and not displaying a word in the word bank until its letters are quite clearly visible would help a lot in making this properly manageable but still appealing as a massive word hunt.
While playing Word Search 10K, I exited and reopened the game at least 15 times, and that’s only after I learned the slowdown could be rectified through a reset. It also took me nearly 38 hours in total to complete, and there were definitely moments where it worked as a perfectly fine word search puzzle. Too often though the hunt was impeded by unnecessary problems and often those problems made me just wish for a typical word search smaller in scope. If the game was instead 100 word searches and the game displayed their entirety on screen at all times, it could have avoided the unusual technical problems and likely would have been a decent time waster, but the gimmick that drew my attention to this specific word search game ended up being its undoing. Perhaps there is a right way to handle this massive word search concept, but Word Search 10K’s rough execution certainly kept it from realizing this seemingly simple idea in an enjoyable manner.