Bound by Your Word

Hey galactic lexical army, it's Bound by Your Word, the futuristic word-association puzzle game. Repair a broken Thinkoverse by re-connecting lost words to their sector.

Created in one week for Brackeys Game Jam 2023.1.

How to play

This game requires a hardware keyboard and won't play on many mobile devices. Software keyboards won't cut it.

Each puzzle presents up to 6 clue words that connect to a mystery word. Solve the puzzle by typing the mystery word. Your word must connect to ALL of the clue words.

Notice the arrows that connect the clues to the mystery word: they show that the connection is directional. The clues ABOVE the mystery word are the START of the phrase. The clues BELOW the mystery word are the END of the phrase. Clues only connect to the mystery word and do not need to relate to each other.

For example, if the puzzle is:

...you'd type the answer COLD, and hit the ENTER or RETURN key of your keyboard to submit your answer. COLD is correct because it connects to ALL the clue words, to form the phrases:

• stone cold
• ice cold
• common cold
• cold call
• cold sore
• cold blooded

Words like CREAM or PHONE are not correct because they do not connect to ALL of the clue words. For example "ice cream" is a common phrase, but "cream blooded" is not. Similarly, "phone call" is a common phrase, but "phone sore" and "stone phone" are not.

Win by solving 10 puzzles other than the tutorial.

Tips and tricks

• Hints: By default, the game will automatically give hints after some time or a few bad guesses. If you don't want hints, you can turn them off via the Settings screen. (Access Settings via the main menu.) If you want faster hints, then guess the word HINT. This will trigger the next hint, if one is available. There is no hint limit nor penalty. Do what's fun for you.
• Skips: You can skip a level by guessing the word SKIP. There is no skip limit nor penalty. Skipped puzzles do not count as a solved puzzle, and will eventually come back to haunt you.
• Typo correction: By default, if you guess a word that is close to a correct answer, the game will auto-correct your guess to become the correct one. You can turn this off via the Settings screen, for a more strict experience.
• Pauses and Continues (save state): There is no way to pause the game, but your progress is automatically saved on your current web browser, on your current machine. So if you exit out of the game and re-visit it later from the same browser and machine, you can continue where you left off. Similarly, the game remembers which puzzles you've solved, so you will generally see fresh and unsolved puzzles as you play. You can reset your save file via the Settings screen. This will reset your other game settings as well.
• The end is not the end: The deck has ~90 puzzles, but you only need to solve ~10 to win. So if you beat the game and play it again later (on the same web browser, on the same machine), you'll get fresh puzzles for a while.

Known issues

• The game requires a hardware keyboard, and is not playable on phones via the touchscreen nor a controller.
• Under certain conditions, you might see the tutorial puzzle during normal gameplay.

See also

This game was written for the Brackeys 2023.1 game jam. If you enjoyed it, maybe check out the Matchbreaker word game I wrote for the 2021.2 jam.