Believe it or not, there are people who love word search puzzles. I know of a person who goes through book after book of them. “Word Search” reaches out to word search puzzle fans, but adds some innovative new options that are as surprising as they are well done.
It’s from “Utopioneer Games”, who frequent readers of this blog will probably remember for games like the “Hack This Game” series, “Code Breaker”, “Spanish 101”, “German 101”, “Vocabulary Builder”, (the super unusual) “Call Me”, and (the most recently reviewed) “Bingo”. Most of what they release I like, and “Word Search”.
So how do you innovate on word search? You do so by giving people the option of replacing words with symbols, to mix up the pattern matching options. You do so by letting people look for words backwards if they wish (I don’t think most computer word search apps I’ve seen before offer that option). And you do so by offering an expert mode with a massive grid of letters, and which doesn’t even prompt you of what words you’re looking for. There’s only so much you can do with word search, and I think it’s pretty much all been done here (other than, I suppose, multiplayer, in which case I’d recommend Microsoft’s own Wordament on Windows 8, Windows Phone, and iOS). But for a solo word search title, I think the 80 Microsoft Point “Word Search” is probably the best I’ve seen.
Then again, maybe you hated word search in school like this guy:
Here’s what the developer (Utopioneer Games 2) has to say about the game:
“Word Search includes puzzles of all difficulties, ranging from easy puzzles that have a small grid to expert puzzles with a large grid and no word bank.”
Writings of Mass Deduction 