I am blaming Cursed Words for my lack of free time

As Kyusai’s resident roguelike goblin, it is my solemn duty to put a ridiculous number of hours into any roguelikes, deck-builders, or word games that end up floating onto Steam. Lo and behold, Cursed Words is the latest time-sink that I’ve become feverishly obsessed with.

Cursed Words: The Word Game That Isn’t is a weird word roguelike that has you spelling all kinds of funky phrases with phonetically perplexing puzzle pieces. You can spell with everything from blue threes to clubs, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Here’s Kyusai’s full Cursed Words review, completed on PC.

Grossly engrossing

Cursed Words is incredibly simple at its core, following a standard word roguelike format, but it gets increasingly silly and abstract as you make progress.

To start, you’ll pick a character for your run, each with their own special pin that changes how you can play, and then be sent exploring across a map, tasked with spelling words to reach a target score for each round. There’s a set number of boards for each round, meaning you have limited word tiles to use.

Special items and stickers will help you make progress, available from a between-rounds shop. These items vary wildly, including everything from chocolate bars to Ferris wheels, and they’ll help you access particular letters, tiles, or score buffs.

As you make your way through a map’s levels, you’ll come up against a handful of quirky bosses, ranging from a belligerent badger to an angry axolotl.

These bosses have special abilities, like summoning tricky letters or limiting the amount of boards you have access to. Just like the regular levels, the boss rounds get increasingly trickier as you make progress, but you get the choice of two bosses ahead of time, meaning you can pick one that suits your current build best.

Builds are vast and vibrant in Cursed Words, and I felt like every run I played through was unique. Characters all have special items, as mentioned, with some prioritizing red and blue tiles – said colors change a letter’s score – and others focusing on numbers, which can be scored as regular letters.

As you might imagine, using a red tile-focused build with a number tile-focused character doesn’t work, so creativity and adaptability are key here.

I went into Cursed Words thinking it’d be just another word roguelike where you need to spell long words to score highly, and it was a pleasant surprise to find void tiles, numbers, and card suits littering the boards instead.

The game felt quirky and odd, and it was a refreshing addition to a segment of the roguelike world that’s beginning to get as crowded as the roguelike deck-builder niche.

A cacophony of roguelike excellence

Something I loved about Cursed Words was the difficulty curve. The game is simple to pick up and get started with, and the first few characters have powerful pins to help them get through the boards, but there’s a smooth and steady difficulty increase that keeps things engaging.

There’s even a challenge segment that you’ll unlock after making progress with the game, adding extra content and a deeper level of difficulty into the mix.

I also enjoyed how easy the game was to pick up for short bursts. While I did admittedly spend several hours at a time glued to the screen and trying to burst my way through the later boss battles, I also found the game easy to dip into for a quick play session where needed. It’s the sort of game you can pick up for a short play session after a busy day at work, for example.

Visually, Cursed Words is a treat, with a simplistic but charming art style and an interesting variety of sprites for both characters and items.

A standout feature for me was the accessibility options with Cursed Words – there are lots of visual effects like bobbing tiles and wiggling boards, and even pulsing buttons. It’s possible to toggle these on and off, though, meaning you can customize the visuals to fit your personal needs.

Along with the accessibility options, I was impressed with how clean the game’s interface felt. It was minimalistic and easy to navigate, but it still had plenty of charm – especially thanks to the helpful little advice button that popped up on the store and character select screen.

I didn’t encounter any bugs with Cursed Words – other than the ladybird item – and found the performance to be smooth and high quality throughout my time with it. This title felt premium and polished from start to finish.

Word roguelikes and spelling games aren’t anything new – Steam alone is overflowing with them, and as someone who spends a mountain of time in the roguelike niche, I am rarely surprised by them. I love them, but the format is generally quite concrete.

Cursed Words changed this, though. It added a fresh, chaotic spin on what seemed like an entirely solidified formula, and threw in a generous amount of content to work through with its multiple bosses, characters, and challenges. If you like word challenges and games like Balatro, this is a title that I’d urge you to check out for yourself.

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