Cursed Words: The Word Game That Isn't Review: Balatro for People Who Love Boggle

Starts as Boggle, ends as Schrödinger's word game

Cursed Words: The Word Game That Isn't opens with a familiar hook: find words on a letter grid, like Boggle, and score points for length and rarity. Developed by Buried Things and published by Forklift Interactive, the game then spends its entire runtime breaking that premise on purpose, introducing chess pieces, digits, and Unicode symbols that can stand in for letters, until a "word" like a knight, a queen, a question mark, and the digit 3 becomes a perfectly valid, high-scoring play. Runs are shaped by a chosen Character, Sticker upgrades, a Stamp loadout, and consumable Tiles, structured across five stages with two encounters and a boss each, echoing the escalating, synergy-hunting rhythm popularized by Balatro.

At $14.99, it's priced in line with that comparison class of roguelike deckbuilders, and the review base leans overwhelmingly toward agreeing it earns the comparison, while disagreeing more sharply about whether the game's central joke, that the words eventually stop mattering, is a feature or the seed of its biggest weakness.

The best Balatro-inspired game since Balatro, according to a lot of players

The dominant sentiment across the review base is enthusiastic, often surprised delight. One widely-echoed sentiment describes it as "the first one since Balatro that gets basically everything right," with reviewers repeatedly noting that, just as Balatro doesn't require real poker skill, Cursed Words doesn't require a strong vocabulary to become absorbing. Reviewers describe stringing together increasingly absurd combinations, one recounting a winning "word" made of fractions, chess pieces, and punctuation marks, as some of the most purely delightful moments the genre has offered them.

Beyond the core hook, reviewers consistently praise the amount of content and the pacing of its unlocks, describing dozens of hours of engagement, a strong sense of humor in its character writing, and, for several, comparisons to how thoroughly Balatro consumed their free time. One reviewer with over 90 hours logged called it simply "one of the best roguelikes I've ever played."

When the words stop being the point

The review base's most substantive criticism turns the game's own title against it. Multiple reviewers describe a real tension where, as wildcard tiles and advanced mechanics unlock, forming an actual word stops being necessary at all, with runs devolving into what one reviewer called "clicking around squares to find the longest string possible rather than using witty word play." Another put it more bluntly: "the words don't matter so it's not a scrabble game that challenge your knowledge of words." For players drawn in specifically by the word-search premise, this shift reads as a real bait-and-switch rather than an intentional joke, even though the game's own subtitle explicitly warns players about it in advance.

This complaint sits in genuine tension with the praise above; the same escalation from words to nonsense that thrills most reviewers is precisely what frustrates this smaller but vocal group, making it less a flaw everyone agrees on and more a fundamental fork in what different players actually want from the premise.

RNG that limits how much you can plan

A second recurring complaint concerns how much of run-to-run success depends on restrictive shop and unlock randomness rather than player skill. Reviewers describe a "lottery shop" system that can leave certain build archetypes, particularly a character built around chess-piece mechanics, feeling close to unplayable across repeated attempts, with one reviewer reporting over ten straight losses with that specific character. Others note inconsistent interactions between Stamps and Stickers, where buffs reviewers expected to trigger simply didn't, undermining the sense of mastery that makes Balatro-style optimization satisfying in the first place.

Scattered bugs and technical rough edges

Beyond balance concerns, a handful of reviewers report more concrete technical problems, including one detailed account of a freeze that wiped an entire run's saved progress, and isolated complaints about poor performance despite capable hardware. Steam Deck and controller support draws its own specific, repeated complaint, with even several enthusiastically positive reviews carving out an explicit exception for how difficult the game is to navigate without a mouse.

A dev team that's still listening

One detail worth noting is how actively the developers appear to be engaging with the criticism above. At least one detailed critical reviewer specifically references reading dev replies to negative reviews acknowledging the RNG weighting concerns and explaining their design philosophy directly, a level of visible responsiveness that's relatively rare this soon after a roguelike's full launch. That doesn't resolve the underlying disagreement over how restrictive the shop RNG should be, but it does suggest a team paying close attention to exactly the fault lines the review base has identified, which bodes reasonably well for how the game's balance might evolve over its first several post-launch patches.

Verdict: a worthy heir to Balatro's throne, with real asterisks

Cursed Words: The Word Game That Isn't earns its comparisons to Balatro honestly, delivering the same kind of escalating, synergy-chasing high that made that game a phenomenon, filtered through a genuinely clever word-search premise that most reviewers say sticks the landing. The recurring criticism that its own core hook, actual wordplay, fades in relevance as runs progress is worth taking seriously, especially for anyone buying specifically for that appeal rather than the broader roguelike loop, and the RNG-heavy shop and inconsistent mechanic interactions add real friction on top. For fans of the genre chasing their next Balatro-shaped obsession, though, the overwhelming consensus is that this is exactly that, warts and all.