Puzzles are my jam. There’s nothing I love more than a batch of brainteasers to blast through. But Mixups by POWGI was not especially satisfying to get through for me. Here’s why.
I realised while playing that I am especially fond of number puzzles. The sort of problems that can be solved with the right method, no prior knowledge required. Sadly, Mixups by POWGI puzzles cannot be solved if you haven’t heard of the word beforehand. Or it can, if you want to try the hundreds of combinations that fit into that 9-letter space I guess. Trial and error isn’t fun though; it’s simply tedious.
This is what kept happening to me. I’d pick a category which has 18 words in it. It’d start off with obvious ones. So “trains” would have “tracks” in the first set as an example. And they’d become more and more obscure until I’d inevitably get stuck. The only available hint you’re provided with is the first letter of each word, and that is not a massive help. I’m not going to suddenly know which type of bread it is from the first letter being “P” if I didn’t know it before.
Fortunately, there is a workaround which helps make the game more fun and that’s playing with friends. It became significantly easier when my housemates chipped in with guesses as well and decreased the need to google answers or whack the letters in an anagram solver. Still, it’s a minor fix, and didn’t eliminate the need to have a google tab open entirely.
I think the game would benefit massively from a more robust hint system. Maybe revealing more letters at random rather than only allowing one, or revealing both the first and last letters might help. Anything would be better than providing one measly letter when you often have 25 to sift through.
Honestly, the most fun I had was just seeing how many dumb words I could make with the letters provided. Childish, I know. But it’s fun all the same.
There are a couple minor things I want to mention too. As I was provided with a US copy, I didn’t know most Americanisms beforehand and resorted to google to find them. And on occasion the game would fail to load the next set of puzzles when I selected that menu option. Spamming the button seemed to fix it but it was weird regardless.
Overall, Mixups by POWGI left me underwhelmed. It’s a very basic puzzler and one that is inherently flawed in that if you don’t know the word, you’re not going to be able to solve the puzzle without blind luck or bashing your head against a wall for a long time. When a word clicks it feels great, but if a word evades you, it simply leads to googling an obscure pasta you’ve inevitably never heard of.
A digital copy of Mixups by POWGI was supplied for PS4 by the developer.