This part Wordle/part picross mashup game has its hooks in us.
Word games can be a nice way to kick back and push our brains, and the digital version of LOK is no different.
The “AHA!” moment is one of the best parts of creative thinking. Whether it’s in science or art or play, it’s that moment where everything falls into place, that second that we internally scream “Eureka!” and do a fist pump (sometimes not silently). Puzzle games give us that more than any other gaming genre, because so much of their design is about the dominoes lining up just right. LOK Digital does that. It blends together different subgenre types into a sort of word-based puzzle game that becomes vastly more challenging as we play, and yet when we get it *just right* we find ourselves with a grin from ear to ear that we got it.
What started as a printed book, LOK Digital is (obviously) the video game adaptation. The basic premise is that letters are laid out in a pattern of squares, and to clear the pattern we need to form words from those letters in horizontal or vertical lines. Depending on which word it is (they become much more complex as the game moves one) we can take out an extra square, line, or complete section of the board.
The words are nonsensical, and yet they’re all linked by the overlapping combinations of specific letters. For example the first word we learn is LOK, and when we use that word we can knock out an adjacent letter. On a board that has LOK and a blank space spelling LOK lets us remove that extra spot. Easy! But then we’re given more words to juggle, like TLAK and TA, that are mixed into the board and we need to circumnavigate around. We might be required to spell LOK just to clear the space between the T and L on TLAK so that we can get to that word next.
What starts as a really simple process becomes layered and complex, and often leaves us wondering if we’re on the right path; sometimes we can clear out three quarters of a board before realizing that we actually should have used a different word or location earlier. Most of the boards have a mostly definite path, but thankfully the game is generous in helping us without fully taking the reins to solve something. The developers have gifted a standard undo button to let us walk back the moves, but more interestingly is the hint system, which just lists the words that need to be solved in order but not where on the board. If the next word hint is LOK, there might be two or three available on the screen.
LOK Digital requires a lot of planning and maybe even more backtracking, but then when something hits, when we finally “see” it, we’re left in awe at how everything falls into place. Queue the gif of Antonio Banderas leaning back in his chair, because that’s how I reacted, often, while playing this game on my laptop at the local coffee shop.
The game is simple enough to function on Steamdecks and PCs, and is also available on mobile, where it might just cause us to burn more minutes in meetings than actually working on that accounting project.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for January 27, 2025. Images and video courtesy Publisher.
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