If there is one criticism you can throw at the bounty of POWGI games, it’s that the puzzles themselves can be a bit throwaway. By that I mean that many can be completed quickly, and aren’t of a very high challenge. That was true until Word Web by POWGI, a logic word puzzle that is Lightwood Games’ most challenging offering so far. This is one that will really get the brain ticking over.
But not so difficult that the puzzles are obtuse. Word Web by POWGI is challenging in a good way.
Word Web by POWGI can be a bit tricky to explain, but is very simple once you get the hang of it: 25 letters of the alphabet – all apart from the letter ‘Z’ – need to be placed in a 5×5 grid. That grid won’t necessarily make sense if you were trying to read it horizontally or vertically, but instead words can be found using a shown list. As you will see, the letters are chained together and you can follow a path to find each of the words listed once the grid is complete. Each letter has a specific place in the grid it needs to go, otherwise the grid – and the puzzle – won’t work.
My first thought when I saw the grid laid out in front of me was ‘Now you are talking!. For a while, the POWGI games have offered little in the way of difficulty, and seen by some as easy achievement fodder. But Word Web is entirely different. It doesn’t necessarily require a strong concept of the English language, but you need to look for patterns in the words themselves, and that will give you an idea of basic letter placement.
Letters that are only used once or twice are best placed around the edge of the grid where they will have fewer connections. Likewise, more commonly used letters need to be in the centre. And if you can recognise consecutive letters in multiple words, you know to place those in and around each other.
It is unlikely that you will be able to add a full word in one go. Instead, you are more likely adding the odd letter here and there, using deduction to work out where they go and then building out from there.
And the words can be all sorts of length too. They run from a three-letter word to some grids including eight-letter words that snake through the grid.
In Word Web by POWGI, there are 120 of these to go at. They aren’t split up into difficulty, but until you really get the hang of it, the first few you try will likely be the trickiest. There is a set way of working these out that may not seem apparent at first. But it won’t be long before you begin to notice patterns and have your own methods for completing these in the fastest times possible.
Overall though, these Word Webs are a lot trickier than previous POWGI games. Simply finding words like in Word Maze by POWGI or Sixty Words by POWGI isn’t going to cut it here. You need brainpower; the same brainpower you used in Crypto by POWGI or Wordbreaker by POWGI. But also more of it.
You can use a hint if you are stuck, but all this does is remove any letters that have been placed incorrectly. This will obviously help those that are stuck, but if you are really struggling for which letter to place where, this hint system may not be the most useful to you.
You can also cycle through the words at the bottom and in doing so will highlight the letters on the grid and to the side still to be used. This can come in very handy as it highlights the letters on the grid and you can begin to see a trail forming, even perhaps, showing you where a gap is for a missing letter. Use this often to make things a lot easier.
Your reward is, as usual, a delightful pun. Even now, as I am playing my *checks notes* thirteenth POWGI game, I still have not tired from these. I often wonder where they are still coming from as I have seen very few repeated in all that time. But everytime, they are welcome.
As alluded to earlier, there is still some easy Gamerscore to be had out there. Most are for spelling out specific words within the grid, and all of these will unlock as you play through each puzzle. There is also another achievement for spelling out a rather rude word; POWGI veterans already know what word that is. Remaining achievements are for doing various things in-game, but as you can replay any level as many times as you wish, nothing is missable here.
What starts off as a seemingly impossible challenge quickly becomes one of the best POWGI games for logical thinking. Word Web by POWGI not only ramps the difficulty up, but also the satisfaction of completing a puzzle. These are far less throwaway than in previous games, really requiring you to think a little bit about things before adding your letters. And the extra difficulty means a longer playtime. That means more bang for your book, which is never a bad thing.
