Original TimeSplitters and GoldenEye developers David Doak and Steve Ellis have reunited to make – oh, those scalliwags, you’re going to love this – a roguelike word puzzler called Beyond Words, which is being billed as “Balatro meets Scrabble”.
That quote is actually from Time Extension, but publishers PQube have reprinted it ecstatically in the announcement release, and well, come on, look at it. Watch the trailer below. If this game wasn’t inspired by Balatro, I will eat an actual Scrabble board, mossy green bags and all. Then I will shit a match-winning seven-letter word of mild approval, like “quality”. I do like Scrabble, even when it has 300+ modifiers in it and some possibly AI-generated polar bears.
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You can find a demo for Beyond Words on Steam. If you click through and play that demo, I will not have to explain the game any further, and can save my precious high-scoring words for other breaking news stories, like whatever the hell Tim Sweeney has said now. But no, I see that you are still reading, because you are too much in thrall to words. Friend, I can only salute your lexophilia. Here is another paragraph, specially for you.
As in Scrabble, the goal in Beyond Words is to form your hand of letter tiles into high-scoring words. But this ain’t the traditional Scrabble layout, with those wily triple-word bonus squares in the far corners. There’s a selection of boards, aka “living puzzles”. Some of them look like Zelda dungeons after a pinch of nose candy, sprinkled with gold coins and barricades and power-up signs.
This isn’t the traditional Scrabble scoring system, either: you can change letter scores, duplicate them and destroy them. You can “bend the rules past breaking point with modifiers, stickers, and enhancements where every choice shapes your journey”. There are also time attack challenges, boss battles, seeded runs and “the brain-melting flipside of negative scoring”. If you play the demo, please get back to us to confirm whether your brain has melted – I’m quite attached to my brain and would rather not risk it.
Beyond Words is due in early access in early 2026. The Steam page carries the disclosure that “generative AI was one of many tools used by professional artists to assist in the creation of the artwork for the game”. I have to write up Sweeney’s latest next so I’ll save today’s torch-waving excoriations about generative AI usage for that post.
The court dutifully acknowledges that this is not the first time somebody’s spilled Balatro over Scrabble – there’s also Letterlike and Word Play, at the very least. If you’d rather play some kind of first-person shooter with N64 or PS2 graphics, maybe check out loving fangame TimeSplitters: Rewind.
