WORDLACE

Almost all of it is answer

Letters in a grid. Read a clue, trace it through neighbouring tiles, and the word leaves the board. Carry on with what is left.

Almost every tile is part of an answer. Almost. One or two in the early chapters, up to six in the last belong to nothing at all — and nobody tells you which. Because of those few, the last word cannot be counted out: four tiles left does not mean a four-letter word. You have to read the clue.

Once the board is solved, it names the spare letters itself.

If it fits, it is the one

Every answer has exactly one route across its board, and no second set of words covers the same tiles. That is proved for all 1,600 puzzles before the game reaches you. You will never be guessing at what the designer meant.

Paths never cross — not their own, not each other's. A finished board reads as a drawing rather than a knot.

Five vocabularies, one campaign

Between the chapters of everyday words run chapters about cinema, games, history and geography. Not a separate mode, not a menu: twenty-four themed chapters turn up along the way, when they fit the difficulty, each with its own name and its own colour.

Behind every answer there is something short and worth knowing — why the sun comes up at ten in the morning in western China, or about the fourteen-hour Dune that Jodorowsky spent years on and never shot a frame of. They all stay in a journal you can go back to.

800 in English, 800 in Russian

Two campaigns, each with its own vocabulary and its own difficulty curve. Menu language and puzzle language are set separately, so you can read English and solve in Russian.

A hint opens a word one rung at a time, from a single letter to the whole answer — and nothing makes you use one. If you want the opposite, the clues can be hidden entirely and the puzzle solved from the lengths alone.