There's a new game from the creator of Wordle called Parseword. It's a cryptic word puzzler that's considerably more difficult.
The game involves a wide range of techniques, with the aim being to end up with two related words. However, tutorials and hints are on hand to help out.
Wordle took the world by storm in 2021, quickly going viral before it was snapped up by the New York Times a year later. Now there's a new game from Wordle's creator called Parseword, and it's even more cryptic than before.
The simplicity of Wordle made it popular: just adding a word meant you could progress to the solution through trial
and error. Of course, there are some strategies, like hitting more common letters in the alphabet first, but Parseword is considerably more complicated.
The aim of the game is to end up with two matching parts, based on a starting phrase. But there are a lot of dimensions to Parseword, making it a lot more cryptic than Wordle ever was.
The new game is based on cryptic crosswords and can be found on parseword.com, with a tutorial to get you started. There's a lot of wordplay going on here – even the name Parseword is a play on words – with a number of options for solving the puzzle.
That might involve reducing words by combining them or just parts of each word, it could be through using synonyms. The game allows the flexibility to use parts of an initial word, modified literally by other words in the phrase.
For example, if you have the words "backwards" and "dog", you can use the "backwards" to reverse "dog" into "god". Fortunately, the options open to you are explained through a tutorial and that's definitely the place to start, otherwise you'll probably struggle to make any progress at all.
There are three play modes – learn, play, challenge – and one of the great things about Parseword is that you can click around and get little explainers for what everything is.
The creators of the game said that the idea was to make cryptics more accessible. There's a long history of cryptic puzzles and they've been rather niche and difficult to access and Parseword is designed to change that.
The problem is that Parseword remains a difficult game. Because it runs in a browser, it at least has the advantage of feeding you information along way and can throw out hints in a way that something on paper can't. But from the time I've been playing Parseword, there are moments when you have absolutely no idea how to progress.
Wordle feels relatively simple compared to Parseword: in Wordle the solution is normally accessible and you usually kick yourself if you don't get it, because it becomes fairly obvious.
Parseword is more of a challenge and that might lead to more people walking away before they get to grips with the patterns and techniques that Parseword requires.
It's fun – it will certainly fill a quiet portion of your day – but it's hard to see that this will become the viral hit that Wordle was.
