I really have a thing for word games. On Pogo, I’d stick with Bookworm and Word Whomp 90% of the time I was logged on. On Neopets, I play Cliffhanger (hangman) and Castle of Eliv Thade (anagram solver) all the time. On Yahoo, Flip Words and Text Twist are my favorites. Needless to say, Spellagories came as a fine addition to my library of little word games.
However, Spellagories is a bit far from the usual word game. It combines a medieval fantasy atmosphere with a classic anagram solver, where you spell words to break the spells cast upon villagers by evil wizards and sorceresses.
Each magic anagram is given a theme and with the given letters you must spell the correct word to dispel part of the spell. To get a hint towards the word you must type, you can type any possible words from the available letters. The only problem with this system is that sometimes not all the letters needed for the magic word will be in the anagram, which forces you to type a bunch of other things to unlock the appropriate letters.
You can choose to play in three modes/difficulty settings:
- Story, where you travel through the kingdom healing villagers and trying to destroy the five wizards before you run out of time. You can pick one out of three difficulty settings.
- Untimed, where you can cure the villagers of the five kingdoms at your own pace. This mode also has three difficulty settings.
- Arcade, where you keep dispelling an endless stream of villagers. To unlock the castles for this mode, you need to beat the respective mages in Story Mode.
You have until the sun sets to find all the words to break a spell. During the nighttime, you will spell as many words as you can until the wizard gets to your window. It might take quite a few nights to get the counterspell ready. The quicker you guess the magic word during the day, the longer you will have at night. If you can’t cure a villager during the daytime, one of your candles will be extinguished. You have three candles to use before your game is over.
Finding a magic word on your first try gives extra hints. You can accumulate up to 10. To use a hint, click on the crow.
There are bonus levels of sorts, which require you to look at a scrambled word (usually containing more letters than the actual word) and guess the theme that best describes it, within a time limit.
Spellagories is an original word puzzle, with pleasant music and sound effects that reflect the magical environment of the story. The graphics are quite nice, and you can see that a lot of detail has been put into creating the different characters, both in their animal and human forms.
You can download the free trial at the official site and weave your own magic words for an hour. A little grey matter and fast fingers are all you need to play this game, and if you enjoy word games as much as I do, you certainly should give Spellagories a try.
Special thanks to Kirem Weers and PlayFirst for providing the full version of the game.
Minimum System Requirements:
- Windows 98, 2000, ME or XP
- Processor: Pentium III 600MHz minimum
- RAM: 128 MB
- 11 MB available disk space
