mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

Every year in April, LGR used to do a themed month of edutainment game reviews. Since he called it quits I have held my own Edutainment Month here on DW, because it's important to be the change you want to see in the world.

First up is Word Rescue, a platformer designed to drill kids on reading basic words. The deep lore of the game is that the Gruzzles, these evil little monster guys, can't read, and they don't want anyone else to read either, so they have stolen all the words from our books and you have to, you might say, rescue them. You do this by jumping into question mark blocks which turn into words, and then finding the picture that matches that word elsewhere in the level. When you've matched them all, you get the key to the next level.

I'm gonna be honest with you guys: This game is actually kind of hard. At the beginning I confidently selected the highest difficulty level (10 years old and up) but found that there are a lot of Gruzzles and they move super fast. You can summon a bookworm friend to dump slime on them to make them go away, but the slime isn't refilled on respawn. So if you've already collected all the buckets in a level and then you die, the only way to get rid of the Gruzzles is to lure them into the various deadly waterfalls and toxic waste pits scattered around, and in some levels there aren't any.

If you reduce the difficulty, there are fewer Gruzzles and they move slower, but you're so zoomed-in that it's still easy to get ambushed from the edges of the screen. And the floaty, finicky platforming makes it awkward to navigate around and avoid words you don't want to collect yet, spawning more Gruzzles. You die in one hit, and although you get infinite lives, every time you respawn you lose your progress on the level and the locations of the words are re-randomized. A lot of the difficulty of the game stems from remembering where in the fairly large, graphically repetitive level you saw a word, so this isn't a trivial penalty.

The pool of words is the same no matter what age you choose, so as a 10-year-old when the game came out, that aspect was too easy for me. The educational content would be more appropriate for new readers—but then the platforming would be too hard for them, so who is this game for? My brother and I did play it as kids, but not very much, and I can see why.

The only thing I enjoyed about my recent playthrough was the music, which loops a couple of 1950s rock-and-roll style midis. It reminded me of the music from the antique shop in Monkey Island 2, which admittedly might have influenced me to feel more positively disposed.

You can buy the full version of Word Rescue on Steam for $4.99 USD. You can also still download the free shareware episode from the website of the developer Redwood Games, which delivers a dose of nostalgia in itself as it appears not to have been updated since 2006. (I enjoyed the indignant rant about Windows Vista breaking backwards DOS compatibility.)

But note that Redwood's site claims Word Rescue was "the first game ever made in which you got to pick whether to play as a girl or a boy," which is a bald-faced lie. Just off the top of my head, I can think of Moraff's World (1991), Ultima VI (1990), and who could forget Fred/Fiona Fixit of the great Night Shift (1990)? So it's up to you whether you want to do business with such a mendacious organization.