Were not really huge fans of word games in general – they tend to be cheap knockoffs of wordsearch or boggle, and have little else to recommend them over the crossword in the paper. But every now and then someone comes up with something new in the space, and in the case of Babel, they came up with darn near 20 new ideas, and that’s worth something.

The basic idea of the game is that you play games to build your tower to the heavens. Each game you play will make the tower higher, but will also increase or decrease the stability of the tower. If your stability gets too low, the tower falls. It’s a neat mechanic, but the best part is that you have 20 different game modes to choose from in making your tower. Divided into the five categories of create, reaction, memory, find, & solve, there are definitely the same old basic word find and boggle-games, but there are also some really innovative and fun word-mini-games that will keep you interested long past the demo period.

Admittedly, some of these game modes are better than others, everyone who played it here had different preferences. I personally liked the Caesar’s Puzzle and Word Link games, which had me swapping letters in multiple words at once, or typing words based on a section of the word before. I didn’t like a few at all, especially the Vowel Vocabulary game, that kept trying to make me make words out of a dozen of the same vowel. This wouldn’t have been so irritating, except the player cannot actually choose the game mode in the quest game – it is chosen randomly, which can get very irritating when you really don’t want to choose one game type, and it keeps choosing it for you.

Also, this is not a game for the weak-willed. All of the game modes have a time pressure, and get harder the deeper you get into the game. By the time you get your tower deep into the stratosphere, you will be on the edge of your seat matching words against the clock. And because you cannot choose your game mode, it will often choose a game mode you have played many times before, forcing you to play a very difficult game when many easy ones are still available. You’re almost guaranteed to lose all of your stability points playing difficult versions of games you didn’t want to play in the first place. Do that 2 or 3 times in a row and game over. That can get pretty frustrating.

But, that being said, Pac Man got pretty frustrating at some point, too – and it was a good game. You just have to be ready for a challenge more like a traditional arcade game than a more common “can’t lose unless you try” casual game. If that’s your cup of tea, and you want to give your brain a good solid workout, this is definitely your game. Go check it out.

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