Out of all of the content creators, video essayists, and live streamers, for me the best critical analysis of video games is done by Mark Brown. He runs the Game Maker’s Toolkit YouTube channel, an account dedicated to dissecting, deconstructing, and criticizing everything. Every genre, from all time periods, with proper historical context, an elegant British speaking voice, and dozens of videos on mechanics, game design, game philosophy, as well as his own dabbles in developing his own games.

Well, he updated the channel with this banger: He made a “Scrabble” meets “Balatro” game that is now available on Steam for $7. And it rules.

I don’t think this has the legs of “Balatro,” which included so much replayability and diversity in its deck building. With “Word Play,” you get the immediate fun, the interesting perks that put twists on your runs, but not necessarily the craving to throw your life away to unlock every joker.

Whenever this hits mobile, I can easily see this becoming a sort of daily check-in game, like a crossword puzzle or “Wordle.” This definitely fits into the mold where you get a digital bag of letters with numbers (like “Scrabble”), and you have only a certain amount of words to spell out and play before the level ends. If you can clear the score total, which goes up every round, then you advance and pick a perk or upgrade to enhance your run.

Most of the perks, however, are too obtrusive, too obtuse, or straight-up game breaking. A lot of the time I find myself not knowing exactly what the perks truly do, and the ones I rely on like a crutch seem very overpowered. My run on the hard difficulty came down to a perk that gave me X3 word scores for not picking any other perks — just like the Stencil Joker in “Balatro.”

But all in all, this is a great little game from one of my favorite video makers, and one of the best minds in the gaming community. In his documentary (above) sharing how he built “Word Play” over a very short amount of time, he even highlights the other games in this new subgenre of “‘Balatro’ but with spelling words.”

All I know is, if more people are inspired to rip off, emulate, or improve upon “Balatro,” then I hope it becomes more fruitful than the ‘garlic-likes’ that came after “Vampire Survivors” — none of which were nearly as good as the game that started the feeding frenzy.

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Image credit: “Word Play” on Steam