Letters, Red In Tooth And Claw: Apexicon Kickstarter
Word Up
Forget Plants vs Zombies and Peggle - I'm still waiting for the next Bookworm Adventures game. Using words as a weapon is (almost) always fun. Why, if Subutai's CLANG had been called SCRIBBLE and been about wielding pens instead of swords, we'd all be happily writing virtual reality letters to one another right now. Apexicon is a Kickstarter for a wordy game and the campaign page that opens with a torrent of namechecks, like a rapper making a comeback and thanking his crew. I say torrent but there are only three names - Puzzle Quest, Scrabble and Bookworm Adventures. Actos Games are hoping to create a fusion of those three.
As well as aiming for $15,000 over on Kickstarter, Apexicon is walking the path of Greenlight. It is, as the developers recognise, more Boggle than Scrabble, with a small playboard of letters to slice through in an attempt to slice through enemy combatants. I've played an early demo version and while it's understandably rough around the edges at this point, with release not expected until May 2014, the basic flow of the game is as appealing as the inspirations suggest.
I'm expecting lots of use of skills and inventory items, since everything seems to gain levels and abilities, which seems more like Puzzle Quest 2 than the first to me. But it may be that I'm misremembering the first. And I might also be the only person who liked the second one quite so much. It was like playing Diablo but with fancy words instead of magical weapons, and polar bears instead of butchers.
Oh, and a swift search for the word 'Apexicon' itself reveals that as well as being a game it is a cream for the treatment of "inflammation and itching due to certain skin conditions". The more you know.