One of the coolest things about the Switch is that it’s portable, and being able to have a slew of games from huge adventures to small bite-sized puzzles makes it a system that anyone can enjoy. One of the most prolific creators of small puzzles on the Switch is Lightwood Games, the developers of Fill-a-Pix, Word Search by POWGI, and one of my personal favorite Switch games of all, Pic-a-Pix Deluxe. They’ve been bringing lots of their Wii U and 3DS games to the Switch, including Word Puzzles by POWGI.
Word Puzzles by POWGI is a collection of six wildly different word games. Each of these word games has numerous puzzles, which means the game comes with a ridiculous amount of puzzles in total! Because each game is so different, I’ll go into each separately below:
WORD MAZE presents you with a grid of letters, a category, and a single word already solved. Your goal is to go through the rest of the letters on the grid, creating a path made up of words that all fit into the category presented. When you’re done all of the letters in the grid will be used, and if you get stuck you can get a hint that lists all of the words you’re looking for. Even if you know what words to find, you’ll still have to figure out how to actually chain them together, but at least you can greatly limit the possibilities. Since you can only move in cardinal directions, the most letters you can start a word with at any given time is 3, but from there on there are countless possibilities!
Word Maze is one of my favorite word games in this collection. Without using the hint you’re left to your imagination, trying to come up with as many words as possible that could fit the category as you can. For example, the second puzzle in the Colors category forces you to start with the letter A, and it’s up to you to figure out a color that begins with A that you can follow. As the puzzle gets more and more full, paths become more and more limited since you can’t use the same letter twice, meaning that sometimes you may find a path based on the limited amount of space before you even have to worry about figuring out the words themselves. The game also displays whatever letters you’ve currently selected, so if you’ve already got “Firefi” in Careers, it may click that the word you’re trying to find is “Firefighter”. It almost seems silly to say it but it’s easy to get caught up in the flow once you find a few words!
Word Puzzles by POWGI includes 60 categories of words, each of which has 6 puzzles, for a total of 360 puzzles!
MIXUPS takes a category with three words and mixes all of the letters up into a single jumbled pile. Your job is to use each tile exactly once to make three individual words, and when you’re done every letter will be used up. You’re shown how many letters are in each word, and you have three hints that you can use to reveal the first letter of each word. If you get a word right it’ll automatically submit it, so you don’t have to worry about submitting incorrect answers.
Mixups is a lot of fun too, but it’s a much harder mode to complete without hints. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing, but I wish it was possible to select which of the three words you’d use the hint on. As it is they go in order from top to bottom, but it seems like whenever I want to use a hint I want to use it on the bottom one first. The game does get easier when a word or two is solved, though, as you can easily see which letters are already used.
Like Word Maze, Word Puzzles by POWGI includes 60 categories, each of which has 6 puzzles, which once more comes to a total of 360 puzzles.
ONE WORD is a word search made up of a single word. These words are all pulled from blanks in a quote from a famous person, and you aren’t told what word you’re looking for unless you use a hint. If you aren’t familiar with the quote you can usually figure it out with context clues and the fact that the entire word search is made up of only the letters in that word. For example, if you’re looking for the word FOND, the only letters you’ll see are F, O, N, and D in the word search. The quote shows the number of letters in the word, and with that combined with a word search made up of a bunch of the same letters, even something like CHILDREN is pretty easy to figure out even if you aren’t aware of the quote.
I’ll admit that I’m not very good at word searches, especially when all of the letters are so similar. Some of the longer words are easier since they require more space in each direction to be spelled out, and the controls are great in this mode as you can select words backwards or forwards and it works either way. I got a bit of a headache looking at such similar letters for too long myself, but word search fans may still get a kick out of these.
Because these are quotes, there’s a different number of puzzles in each category. There are once again 60 categories overall, but they range from 3-8 word searches each and from quotes by Napoleon and Socrates to Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Buffet and even Yoda. I’d estimate over 300 puzzles altogether but I’m far too lazy to count them all individually.
FLOWERS presents the player with, well, a flower. The flower has two letters in the center and several petals around the outside. You’re also given 12 letter pairs like ON, SA, ET, or MI. Your job is to place these letter pairings into each of the petals around the central letters to spell words, with one pair being the first two letters and the other pair being the last two letters. For example, if the middle letters are CR and you have ET and SE as two of the pairs, you can spell secret – SE+CR+ET. All of the words will share the same middle letters, and you aren’t shown whether you have a word correct or not until you’ve successfully completed the entire puzzle.
This mode would likely be one of my favorites aside from the fact that the controls are a bit off. Whenever I’m doing one of the puzzles and I realize I made a mistake, I end up making things far worse due to the way the game interprets input. Selecting an already-used letter pairing removes it from where it was and puts the cursor wherever the pairing previously was rather than merely putting it where you want, for example. It also seems like sometimes the cursor jumps somewhere I wouldn’t expect if the puzzle is already partially complete. Neither of these things is game breaking, but it’s a little frustrating sometimes, especially when I’m paying more attention to the pairings than the petals themselves and end up undoing a bit of work.
Flowers has 120 total puzzles, which are much easier to count since there aren’t even categories for them!
CIRCLES is essentially a venn diagram puzzle. You’re shown three circles that overlap, and there are letters scattered between them. Some are only in one circle, and then there’s one in each overlapping portion of where the circles meet. The one in the center, the letter shared by all three, is a question mark and can be anything at all, but it’s the same letter for all three words. Your job is to unscramble all three words while figuring out what the mystery letter is. Like Mixups, you can use hints to unveil the first letter of each word from the top to the bottom. All three words fit a category, but you won’t know what that category is unless you use hints to unveil the first letter of each word and then use another to reveal what the category is.
Circles is another of my favorites in this collection. The words are fun to figure out and it’s cool that they share letters between words. Figuring out the mystery letter can be ridiculously hard or pretty simple, and once a single word is figured out the rest starts falling into place, especially if you can get a hint at what the category is from it. On one puzzle I figured out the word SODA first, which made it clear that all three would be some sort of drink.
Like Flowers, Circles has 120 total puzzles and isn’t broken into categories.
CROSSOVERS is the final word game and it displays a single horizontal and vertical word that meet somewhere, like a crossword puzzle. The intersecting letter is blank, though, and it’s up to you to figure out what it is from the four letters displayed in every diagonal direction from it. Each letter is saved in the corner until all of the mini puzzles are solved, then you have to rearrange them to solve the clue given at the beginning of the puzzle.
Crossovers is fun, but it’s also one of the easiest word games unless the anagram at the end is difficult. There are no hints in this mode so if you can’t figure out what word you can make from the letters you’ll have to use an online anagram solver. On the bright side, you don’t have to worry about having the wrong letters at the end as the game will strike out incorrect guesses until you select the right letter in the first half of the puzzle.
Crossovers has 60 puzzles and doesn’t show you how many mini crosswords you’ll have to solve along the way to the jumble.
FINALLY the game allows you to see your stats from the main menu. Stats include how many of each puzzle you’ve completed, as well as how many hints you’ve used in each game mode (or, in the case of Crossovers, how many errors you’ve made). Hints don’t cost you any kind of in game currency or anything, and you can just go through each puzzle and use all the hints you want, but the stats screen and the added challenge may keep some from using more than they absolutely have to.
In each game mode’s menu is the ability to purchase DLC packs from the eShop. As I write this review there’s a pack for each mode that would double the puzzle count overall (the Crossovers 2 DLC actually triples the puzzle count for that game mode!). I have no idea whether or not there are plans for more or when they’ll be added, but if Word Puzzles by POWGI is anything like Pic-a-Pix Deluxe it may be essentially impossible to ever run out of puzzles!
Word Puzzles by POWGI is available for Nintendo Switch, 3DS, and Wii U. However, the Switch version is a deluxe edition that includes “hundreds of brand new puzzles with all currently available puzzle packs included” according to the Lightwood Games website.
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.