If any of the letters make it to the top row, it's game over. The best strategy is to attempt to work within the system and hope that words fall into place.Pick your words wisely! As you work, more tiles rise from the bottom of the screen, and it'll take all of your lexicological wits, and tactical know-how to keep them down. I can’t expect to play SpellTower by simply spelling things out. Through a variety of moves, which had little to do with words, I could clear the tiles between them, and the letter I needed would tumble down in line with the rest. It would be one too many rows over, or two rows above. Many times, I could almost spell out long words, but as I traced my finger over the tiles, I would reach the end and find that the final letter was missing. To score more than a paltry three- or four-letter word requires a lot of lateral thinking and a bit of luck. SpellTower needs to be approached from a different perspective. In my effort to make sense of SpellTower, I felt suspended between two things that seem similar, but are actually far apart: a game, and my own personal experience with it. I’m either on a subjective whim, or boring you with facts. It is even tougher to sort through my experiences with the game’s basic rules and find something readable to say about them-something that doesn’t wind up sounding like an instruction manual, or me telling you the story of the time I nearly read through the entire dictionary before petering out at the letter S. It is fairly hard shifting through a random batch of letters to find a highly prized word. First, while playing SpellTower, and, then, drafting this review. Not only does it make for a brain-picking puzzler, it illustrates the challenge of talking about game systems, which are fundamentally different from the way people speak. Another option is to do both: recite the facts while telling you about drinking coffee and watching TV but that solution is neither here nor there. I could talk about how the tower grows taller over time, as new rows of letters push old ones toward the top, as if Planet Puzzle League has been built out of a thesaurus. Another option would be to go over the rules at length, describing how the tiles have a gravity, and how they drop to fill in the gap left by words you remove from the screen. I might tell you that it is fun and well designed, but this says little about the game itself. If we were having a conversation, I might say that SpellTower goes well with a cup of coffee, or while halfway-watching an episode of The Walking Dead. You must conform to a set of rules that has nothing to do with verbs and nouns and adjectives, making it hard to recognize words that are churned out randomly.
The other idea is that math will try to stop you. You draw lines through the letters to spell words, moving up, down, left, right, and diagonally across them. The idea is to find words randomly buried within a screen of mixed-up letters. And just as the keys of my laptop are placed in QWERTY layout, an invention that rearranged the alphabet in order to make typewriters less likely to jam, the tiles in SpellTower are randomly stacked in a tower-scrambled with the intent of confusing my familiarity with words. The tiles that are used in the game are a near-exact match for the flat, cleanly written keys of a Macbook. As I stared blankly at my computer, I noticed that the iPad game has a striking similarity to the keyboard. How do you even start to critique a word game? It’s funny that I had nothing to say about a game that is about words-and that I only got the ball rolling by thinking about something else. Coming up with anything to say about SpellTower is tricky.
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