Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey

Overview

The first game to be released by Bacon Bandit Games, Letter Quest has the player fighting various monsters by spelling words using a 5x3 grid of letter tiles. Monsters attack once per word spelled, making the game play out much like a turn-based RPG.

Letter Quest was first released on mobile in February 2014, and was later released for PC and Mac in July 2014.

Story

Grimm, an adorable grim reaper, works very hard and has worked up a big appetite! So he asks Siri where the closest pizza place is, only to realize that it's going to be a really long journey (and he will later realize that delivery would have been much easier!).

Starting in a haunted house, Grimm must work his way through several monster and ghost-filled environments including a graveyard, forest, and more!

Gameplay

Players spell words, one at a time, to attack monsters and ghosts. Each letter has a relative damage value associated with it, based on the color of the little dot in the bottom-right of each tile - bronze letters do the least damage, and gold letters do the most damage.

Monsters can modify the tiles in several ways, making letters unusable, dangerous, or bizarre. Poison and spike tiles cause damage to the player if used in a word, whirlwind tiles change to a random letter each turn, flipped tiles are flipped upside down and backward, duplicator tiles copy themselves to a surrounding tile each turn, stone tiles cannot be used, cracked tiles do no damage to monsters, and plague tiles do no damage and spread to a surrounding tile each turn. Players eventually unlock the use of potions, one of which can be used to purify all bad tiles currently on the board.

Every time the player spells a word, the monster they are fighting gets to attack. Monsters have many possible actions, including attacking, modifying tiles on the board, stealing health from the player, healing themselves, and much more!

When the player defeats all monsters in a stage, they encounter a pile of gems. Spelling a word while at a pile of gems causes Grimm to attack it, breaking it apart and rewarding the player with gems. The number of gems dropped by the gem pile is based on how much damage is done (longer words and words with silver and gold letters will earn more gems).

Reception

Letter Quest was released on February 5, 2014 on mobile, and the game was generally well-received. As of August 2014, Letter Quest has an average review score of 92/100 from 9 reviews, including getting 4.5/5 from Touch Arcade and 5/5 from Cult of Mac.

Letter Quest was released on PC and Mac on July 22, 2014 and has not received any reviews as of August 2014.

Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Remastered

In 2016, the game was re-released as a remastered version, which was given free to all owners of the original Steam release. The game was ported from Adobe Air to Unity, and new features such as the endless mode and a new soundtrack were added. The change of engine was, in part, prompted by the fact that the existing game would not run on Linux. The remastered version was also released on Xbox One and PlayStation 4.