What would you do to get some pizza? Would you spell your way through a whole bunch of enemies? Join Grimm as he works towards trying to get some pizza!
Letter Quest Remastered is the remastering of the word-making game, Letter Quest: Grimm’s Journey. Originally released on PC, Letter Quest recently made the jump onto PS4 and Vita. While I only played a little bit of the original on PC, I did dive head-on into the PS4 version. Prepare your thinking cap as you will need it in order to make it through all of the levels in the game!
The story in Letter Quest is fairly silly. Grimm is on a quest to get some pizza, but some evil baddies are working to try and stop him from doing so. In order to fight them you’ll need to spell out a lot of words, both big and small. The letters are divided into three different “strength” categories that are based on their rarity, much like letters are divided up into different points in Scrabble. Your common letters are the weakest, but letters such as Z and Q will provide nice damage bonuses.
The dictionary in Letter Quest seems to largely be taken from the official Scrabble dictionary. With that said, there are some words that are legal in Scrabble that aren’t legal here (and vice versa). When you spell out your word, you’ll be able to look up the definition on it (which can also sometimes lead to giving you an even better word). The definitions for the words is definitely a nice touch, though I did find a couple typos in a description (“Booger”).
As you complete levels, you will earn crystals and unlock various bonuses in the shop. These bonuses will help you on your quest towards the end of the game by providing you with things such as extra healing, more crystals, or more damage (either straight up more damage or more damage for specific scenarios). Some of the extremely useful bonuses I found during my time playing included extra damage for a double letter (IE: better, letter, zoo), healing with the usage of E’s (or just when defeating enemies), and so on.
Throughout the game you will encounter various bosses. These bosses often have special rules attached to them, causing you to have to think even harder and strategize to try and defeat them. Some hilarious results can and will come out of meeting their special objectives, such as gaining 10x damage if you use the letter Q. These special rules will also come up when trying to earn the final star of each level.
Unlike what you’d expect out of seeing a star-completion system in a game, Letter Quest’s stars indicate being able to repeat the same level with different rules. The first star is the basic level, and is required to be able to do the next two. The second star is the “speedrun” star, requiring you to complete the level within a certain amount of time. The third star adds in a special rule across the entire level, such as specific letters being banned or having to always make words above a certain letter count. The final star, available after the first three stars have been completed, makes every enemy have a (different) special rule attached.
While I only really dabbled in Story Mode (which will last over 10 hours), there is also an Endless mode available to play. I don’t know all of the specifics on this mode as I didn’t try it, I would guess that you simply keep going until you run out of health.
In certain levels, you will come across a treasure chest. In order to unlock this chest, you’ll need to play a Hangman style game. You will have a base of 9 guesses to get it right (more or less depending on how many letters there are and if you have the bonuses that affect this mini-game), with correct guesses not using up a guess. Once the chest is unlocked, you’ll be able to get a small reward such as some crystals or a temporary buff.
Letter Quest definitely helps fill a spot for the Scrabble lovers out there, though as I said before, don’t expect every word that is legal in Scrabble to be legal here. The game played very solidly on the PS4, and I expect it would play even better on the Vita (since the touch screen is available). With a pricetag of only $9.99, Letter Quest proves to be more than worth the asking price with how much you’ll get out of it. With a slew of in-game achievements to get, plus a handful of trophies tied to some of these achievements, you’ll be spelling your way to victory for quite some time.
Letter Quest Remastered Review Score
4/5
Letter Quest Remastered is available now on PSN (PS4/Vita cross-buy) and on Steam.
I would like to thank Bacon Bandits for providing me with a copy for review purposes.
