Game gets popular, games gets clones, that’s just how the cookie crumbles. Vampire Survivors, Buckshot Roulette, Lethal Company; as soon as those games blew up, derivatives were a guarantee. This is true of Balatro too of course, a game which has produced so many clones that wildly swing between dealing with gambling in a tactful manner and outright just saying that it’s good, actually. So how about a Balatro-like that forgoes the gambling, and asks you to whip out a dictionary instead?

That game is Lexispell, a roguelike word game with a dash of physics thrown into the mix. The name doesn’t have great mouthfeel, a tad ironic for a game about words, but the magic is in the spelling. Lexispell positions you as a witch of sorts, one where you fill your cauldron up with letters in a Suika Game sort of fashion. Each letter is worth a certain amount of points, which vary depending on the rarity of the letter, though you can also get fancier ones that are worth more. They can also fuse if multiple of the same letter type land next to one another.

Upon spelling a word, their value is tallied up, and your multiplier goes up for every letter the word contains. When you finish a round, you can then buy scrolls, which are like Balatro’s Jokers, each netting you a different bonus. One of them gives you an extra five points for every letter that looks the same when flipped the other way. Another will add 15 points to your multiplier if you manage to spell a word that’s an anadrome, which is a word that when spelled backwards is a different word altogether.

Lexispell is also a lot slower a game than Balatro, namely because you’ll be spending a lot of time searching for the longest word you can. As it turns out, it’s not that easy to think of words on the fly based on a selection of random letters. Yes, I’ll say it: Lexispell is the Dark Souls of Wordle and no, this is not a hill I will die on because I value my time much too much for that. It is neat, though, and you can check it out on Steam now.