Looking for a fun brain-teaser this weekend? Look no further than Letter Rooms, a letter-jumblingly fun word game created by award-winning developer Klemens Strasser, maker of Subwords, Asymmetric and Elementary Minute.
The new $1.99 anagram-based game boasts more than 200 puzzles, broken down into a dozen topics — including animals, sports, pop culture, and more. What better way to dust off your mind after lockdown?
Photo: Klemens Strasser
The origins of Letter Rooms
“The game started as something different,” Strasser, 27, told Cult of Mac. “I went on a morning walk and had a bus [pass me] by. I thought that some letters of its destination sign were off, so the destination read ‘Pun’ instead of ‘Puntigam.’The initial idea was to make a game around turning letters on and off on a neon sign to form other words. That didn’t look super-appealing and limited me to short words. But after some design iterations, I ended up where Letter Rooms is today.”
As Strasser suggests, the game is about more than just swapping around letters. Letter Rooms employs three primary game mechanics: movable characters (the anagram bits), characters you can switch on and off (like in the original idea), and characters you can swap out for others. Puzzles also contain a clue to let you know what you’re aiming for, giving the game a crossword-type element. If you can’t guess a particular puzzle, simply skip to the next one.
Some neat Accessibility features, too
Letter Rooms also makes use of some of Apple’s Accessibility features, including VoiceOver, the screen-reader feature baked into iOS. VoiceOver translates the content users see on the screen into spoken words. In the case of Letter Rooms, it allows users to play the game even if they can’t see the screen contents clearly.
Photo: Letter Rooms
Strasser, who lives in Graz, Austria, said he first got acquainted with the Accessibility features during one of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conferences.
“An Apple engineer asked me if I ever thought of making Elementary Minute accessible to blind people,” Strasser said. “I never did before, but thought it would be super-interesting. So I got in touch with Dr. Jan Blüher, a blind app developer from Germany, who helped me to make the game accessible, which was super-awesome. The response to it was great!”
Letter Rooms additionally uses the OpenDyslexic font created by Abbie Gonzalez, which makes the game’s content easier to read for people with dyslexia.
Pick-up-and-play fun
Letter Rooms is a pick-up-and-play title that’s perfect for whiling away a few minutes here and there. With the world starting to get moving again following lockdown, it could even be a *gasp* great game for the subway commute to your office.
“During my tests, I saw that it appeals to a broad range of people that usually wouldn’t play word games,” Strasser said. “Everyone told me that they enjoyed its straightforward approach, where you just jump in without going through complicated menus, play a few levels, and then go on with your day. The levels are diverse so that you should always find something that you find easy, but also something that challenges you.”
Download from: App Store (iOS)
