anagraphs calls itself a game with a twist and it doesn't mean lemon slices, more of a perspective manipulation aspect. it's a very simple thing: you get a bunch of letters and the number of anagrams to create, and besides moving letters around, some can also be clicked to rotate them by 180 degrees, so 'u' becomes 'n', 'a' becomes 'e', etc.

the tutorial is followed by who knows how many levels, a certain amount of stars unlock them. the more efficient you are, the more stars you get on each level, as they all have a mandatory move limit (doesn't matter if you move a letter one or more spaces, still counts as one), but there's still room for experimentation with unlimited undo.

the ui and controls are pretty bad. the undo arrow lazily doubles as exit, click for the former, hold for the latter, which is baffling, as it says 'exit' next to the arrow, so they could easily be two separate things to click. there's no level reset either, gotta undo all the moves. and since the arrow is inconsistent and doesn't need to be held if there's nothing to undo, if you click one time too many, back to level select with you instead of the beginning of the level. not only because of this it'd be good if right click also worked as undo.

and even though it's a completely mouse-driven game, or at least it should be, level select can only be scrolled with the left and right arrows, no arrows to click, no mouse swipe motions, nothing. not replacing tapping with clicking is also annoying, if you bring your mobile game to pc, at least put in the absolute minimum effort.

and that's not all, there are plenty of other issues that shouldn't be hard to fix: taking screenshots doesn't work, windowed mode is a non-resizable, non-movable borderless window, and there's no audio whatsoever. sure, no need for audio settings in that case and a game like this doesn't necessarily require a fancy soundscape, but some ambience and a few sound effects would be nice.

the concept is good and I guess for free it might be worth trying for novelty, but it needs serious fixing in the technical department to be recommendable.

I really like the concept, and as non-native English speaker this was a good chance to test my vocabulary.

But I do not like the realisation. What the other review says is still true, and regarding the number of levels: there are three so far. And BEFORE you can play each level you are 'asked' to - as it's non-profit thing - take a look at other games of the same devs (like Lazy Chess). I write 'asked' because there is no way around - you have four choices to click on and get redirected to the store page and after a minute or so you have to wait (meanwhile, an in-game windoow says 'waiting for you to read the page') you finally may enter the level. For this you gain a star which supposedly makes the next level easier, but I didn't really notice that and anyway: you have no choice in this matter, whether you want to have the levell easier or not, as you need to pick one of four choices EACH TIME before a new level.

I understand that non-profit organizations have to do their marketing somehow but this is not the way to do it, feels to pushy. (and just because you are given time to read the page doesn't mean the player really reads it, so what's the point anyway?)

Last but not least I sometimes really had a hard time to click on a letter to change it. Sometimes I clicked and clicked and clicked.... to turn it around, but it simply didn't. Not right away anyway. And that gets easily annoying.

I would have wished for more levels and a less pushy 'please please please please look at my other games'.

Listen, if you play a lot of word games, this is a pretty cool concept, and you might enjoy the game. The lexicon it uses it very strange though, at first I thought it used CEL (Common English Lexicon) but there are many common words that it does not acknowledge, and there are also some very strange CSW only words that are included. And while the concept is cool, even as an avid word gamer and Scrabble player, the game is a bit monotonous. The UI is very bad as well, as it seems the game was ported from a mobile game and not much effort was put into making it extremely user friendly. It took me way too long to figure out how to get to level 4 (you have to use the arrow keys), and there were many other just very odd UI decisions. Again, the concept is cool, if you like word games, you can give this a try, you might enjoy it for a half hour, but besides that its just okay, sadly.

Anagraphs is a casual word game focused on finding anagrams. There is a literal twist, however, in that the game uses a specially designed font in which several letters are vertically symmetrical, meaning letters can be ‘twisted’ in order to create more letter options and therefore, more anagrams!

Overall, Anagraphs is a nice word game to enjoy casually during a break but doesn’t have much to offer beyond what can be seen on the surface. The premise is interesting but only holds one’s attention for so long. If you like word games it may be worth a look, especially since it’s free, but I’d recommend playing on mobile over PC.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
My full review of this game, where I discuss game play, narrative and styling can be found on Indie Hive[indie-hive.com].

Anagraphs is a free mobile app that's been ported to Steam. It's a simple word puzzle where you rotate letters around to make different words.

While this is free to play, it's adware and contains advertising for other products. This obtrusive advertising is unacceptable on Steam, while it is apparently permitted by Valve, it doesn't fly. PC gamers spend thousands on cutting edge gaming rigs, and we don't do that so we can pretend that our rig is an iPhone, and get advertising shovelled into us like the little mobile piggies do.

So while this is "free", it's not really. I can't recommend it.

I played the tutorial and the first three levels. I had to click the edge of the screen to play Level 4.

I could not figure out how to choose the next level. Finally, I left full screen and stretched the window across my two monitors.

Lo and behold, I wasn't allowed to play Level 5, as I didn't have enough stars.

This is just bad.