Word Search by POWGI (Switch) – Review

There are a lot of indie games on Nintendo Switch. Some are new experiences that take advantage of the hardware and the medium of gaming to provide something new while others are rerelease or retreads of past games and concepts. Wordsearch by POWGI is the latter but to an extreme, because word searches are experiences that have existed long before video games and there is little here that truly takes advantage of its medium, outside of the obvious like you don’t need a pen. That is not to say it is bad though.

The structure of this review is going to be different from prior ones simply because there is not really a lot to say here. If you have ever played a word search before then you know exactly what you are getting into. Search for the specific words in a square of seemingly random letters and do it as fast as possible. These words are hidden horizontally, vertically and diagonal. You highlight them using buttons to highlight the word from beginning to end or using the touchscreen. And that is all there is to it.

There is a multiplayer component of up to four players that is both online and local which allows you to play cooperatively or competitively with friends.

This does, however, highlight my only issue with the game and that is how local multiplayer is accessed. Connecting two Switch’s together is fine and done through a menu but for two-four players using one Switch you have to connect the controllers via the Switch’s own controller section in the UI. This is simple to do but the game gives no indication that this is even possible and I only discovered it after the devs told me about it. An option on the menu would have sufficed.

Overall there are 324 different word searches across 27 different categories so there is plenty to do in this title.

Visually speaking the aesthetics and colours are what you would expect from a word search. Mostly white, grey and black but also more vibrant colours like orange, green and purple are used to brighten up parts of the game, highlight words and show player colour.

The music is very fitting for a game like this and in it’s limited ost I don’t think there was a track i actively didn’t like listening to.

Lastly, the game has this mascot dog that appears on the simple menus and on the pause screen. He’s only worth mentioning because of the puns he says at the end of every puzzle. If you can’t stand terrible puns then get ready to groan a lot (I personally love wordplay but that’s my sin).

Ultimately it’s hard to really judge this game. It’s a word search. It is the equivalent of buying one of those word search books but digital on your Switch so it saves paper and ink. It does everything it sets out to do in that regard and the game isn’t glitchy or frustrating in any way. It really comes down to whether you like Wordsearches or not, and if you do then this will do you know harm.