Knotwords is a minimal and elegant logic puzzle — with words.
The rules are simple: arrange the letters in each section so every word is valid, across and down.
Each puzzle may seem difficult at first — but like all my favorite newspaper puzzles, it gets easier as you progress. Each step guides you naturally towards the solution.
This is the kind of game I’ve been trying to make my whole career — I’m amazed Jack and I discovered this design. We hope you like it.
Fun game that can be challenging. Some words are pretty uncommon, especially some of the shorter ones used in order to make a puzzle fit. Can be a little frustrating in that regard. Would rate higher but this uses a ridiculous amount of battery for what the app is. Very much in need of proper power optimization. Doesn’t seem like they care enough to fix it since several other reviews have made the same complaint for quite a while.
I really enjoy the base gameplay, and getting a ton of puzzles to do every month and every day is great, but I dread doing the Sunday Classic because of how needlessly large it is, and how obtuse the clues can get. Some just don’t make any sense, and if your clue includes the word “genus” in it, you should probably rethink it! That aside, I still play it every day, so you must be doing something right.
Overall enjoyable, though with a few flaws. The controls can be unintuitive at times, and the keyboard is too wide on my screen. Puzzles too often feel like trial and error; boards where you have a few words that lock in allow you to work out a solution from a solid foundation. I don’t think the Correct word feedback really helps, since it allows you to just guess individual words.
Great game, but battery drain. The input controls also don’t make sense fully – I’ve tried each input option and none are quite right. Not sure how to improve that, but more importantly is to fix the battery drain. For being a minimal, offline game, with moving background off, I’m surprised so much power is used. I’ll continue to play it, as I purchased the lifetime license, but I need to charge my phone more often now.
The keyboard is too wide for the screen on my Android phone (it’s fine on my iPhone, for some reason). The input options are inconsistent and sometimes frustrating. The game itself is fun enough, but there aren’t enough puzzles unless you pay, which I can’t bring myself to do until they fix the technical issues.
Edit 2: The concept of this game is fantastic. It’s like the Nintendo game Picross but with words. Runs fine for me, controls aren’t super intuitive. I do agree with some people about there needing a human touch at times. Some puzzles will bang it out of the park with interesting words, and others will include repeat words and uninteresting combinations. I find myself mostly playing the “Mini” nowadays – Classic feels too long and Tricky requires too much trial and error for my taste.
Good foundations, bad execution. The controls are not great. Too much of the game is behind a paywall. I don’t mind paywalls for decent games, but this game employs the strategy of attempting to annoy you into buying the full game and that’s an immediate uninstall for me. The free version of the game is miniscule and barely worth a download. It is a very innovative and interesting word game though. That just makes the flaws more disappointing.
i LOVE this game, but the app leaves much to be desired. it’s slow to start, slow to resume. the words can be a bit obscure for my taste, and placing letters is unintuitive at times. (i.e. if there are two crossed words with the middle letter already placed, it doesnt skip over the placed letter.) a word game shouldnt make my phone heat up. (pixel 4a) beyond all of those niggling complaints, the game is a masterpiece.
Fun game and in general a pretty intuitive and easy to learn ui. However, there are a number of usability improvements that I feel are needed. It bugs me that it takes two separate clicks to enter a puzzle, one to highlight the level, and then another to confirm/actually open the puzzle. In addition, it would be nice if we had the option to scale up the in game keyboard.
Not sure if there were updates that made it more stable, but the technical issues do seem to have sorted themselves out. This game is really fun, but my one complaint is that there’s no way to save your progress permanently (like tying to an account or something), which means of you have to reinstall or change devices, you’ll probably lose all your progress. Sound and presentation are perfect, though.
Uh oh, crashes on two devices (phone and tablet). Dumps me back home from the intro screen. Fingers crossed this can get sorted out soon. Really looking forward to playing! EDIT: Crashes on three devices. Other tablet couldn’t run it either. 😞 Update: it now runs without issue, other than one thing. It often crashes my wallpaper all sending me back to the default. Very good game. Sometimes easy, sometimes very difficult. It’s just a little too resource hungry for a word game in my opinion.
The game is fantastic and the concept is very addicting. There are quite a few free puzzles that you can test out to see how you like the game at first before purchasing the full game. The main problem however is for some reason it makes your phone really hot even though it’s a simple concept and premise with not the craziest graphics. There’s also other minor technical issues but It’s still a great game and the concept makes it highly rewarding once you finish a puzzle.
I really enjoy this game, but one significant annoyance for me is that it doesn’t seem to respect my phone being locked to portrait mode. It still rotates the screen when my phone perceives it is sideways, which is especially annoying when laying in bed, and there doesn’t seem to be a setting in game to disable that. Aside from that though, it’s an awesome daily word game and I highly recommend it!
The concept is easily worthy of 4 stars, but the app is so buggy that I can’t play. It freezes for anywhere from 30s-2min on startup, then lags the whole time I am playing before finally crashing. I haven’t even been able to finish a full game without experiencing a crash, which also resets all of my progress on the puzzle. I really hope this gets fixed soon so I can actually play the game!
The game was fun, I even purchased the full version, which I rarely do, but liked the challenges. However I upgraded my phone, and even though it carried over my progress data, the license did not come in, so I am basically locked out. I’ve reached out multiple times to multiple people but did not hear anything back. A good game but beware if you ever change phones!
Well designed with a solid premise. They do need to improve their word list, though: it’s not satisfying to come up with archaic-isms like DOATS, and the grid isn’t constrained enough that they need to include them. Also looking forward to being able to turn off the “congrats you finished” animation that prevents you from moving on until it’s complete!
I regret purchasing this. I liked the free game, not so much the default of “valid” mode where it tells you if a word is valid, but you can paint yourself into a corner which I hated. “Correct” mode made for a game that felt right to me with the amount of time I wanted to play in a day. If I picked any wrong word, it would tell me and it was a nice balance of my time versus difficulty. Purchased the full version, enjoyed it for a week. Suddenly, two and three letter words are now not checked at all and the game is telling me it only does 4 letter words or more. Now, there’s a bug fix, and 2 or 3 letter words are functionally “valid” mode, and correct mode for everything longer. I can still paint myself into a corner, and waste a ton of time. It changed things from a fun little Wordle-like often Picross-esque daily thing into a bit more of a chore that I don’t really enjoy anymore. So, I’m out 11 dollars arguably. I like the game, but I kind of feel bait-and-switched at this point for supporting things with money. Lesson learned about early adoption. To some extent, I suppose I should be improving overall, learning the more esoteric words it seems to like using and generally getting better (and I thought that’s what the monday to sunday difficulty progression was). Keep in mind, it’s still a good game, but it went from like a 5-star thing for me where I was pleased to buy in, to where in my mind I would have maybe mentally rated 3 stars and say “Eh, seems good, but not for me, but it’s free so no harm done.
The free version gives you 10 free puzzles a month and a set of weekly puzzles on a daily schedule, it looks like. The puzzles later in the week are pretty difficult, and the hints are pretty useful. I also like the achievements and the music The app automatically rotates based upon phone orientation, even when that is disabled, which is a minus for me.
Edit: I do think this game is fantastic, but you should wait for technical issues to be sorted out. They shoot and don’t miss. While I currently am having some display scaling issues, the game itself is very playable and extremely fun. The concept clicks very quickly while remaining engaging and challenging.
It’s fun at first, but then it starts to feel really samey. Not only in how you solve the game, but in the words used. Puzzles use the same words over and over. Bigger puzzles will use the same word twice, but one is plural. While the algorithm to generate the puzzles is clever, the puzzles themselves lack a much needed human touch.
Edit: Checked in again to see if issues had been addressed, and it appears they have. Thank you, devs, for keeping at it. It’s a good game. . . . . Original review: Unplayable on Samsung Z Flip3 because keys on the virtual keyboard are cut off on each side. Edited after 3 May update advertised as fix: Still unplayable. Forced into landscape orientation, with tiny virtual keyboard.
It works but runs weirdly hot for what it is. Solved the few available free puzzles to date: word list seems okay but ‘elk’ twice in a puzzle and ‘s___angs’ left a weird impression. Cursor location after deleting is counter-intuitive, would be frustrating if going for speed. Flow/addictiveness interrupted by win animation, which is a good thing after all. Not going to risk a swollen battery for something that could run as a light web page. Ars Technica coverage may have raised expectations…
Would rate this much higher, but it does not respect the rotation mode of my phone, often crashing when it rotates. This makes it unplayable when laying down. Update: this was addressed and the game runs great. I’ve even bought the full version. With a backlog to January 2020, there’s plenty of content!
A truly spectacular game that is hindered by small technical issues. On Android 11, auto-rotate is automatically on regardless of your phones rotation settings — which effectively means you can’t play while laying down. For some reason the keypad is very small, maybe 1/3 the size of a normal keypad. Turning on larger letters doesn’t fix this either. Once these are fixed, this will be an easy 5-star game in my book.
The perfect mix of word jumble and crossword. Plenty to keep you coming back in the free version, but 100% worth getting the paid version too. It’s a little pricey compared to some other apps, but I think the quality justifies the price and I appreciate that it’s a one time purchase instead of a monthly subscription like a lot of other word games.
This app is unique, which earns it a star. But two problems ruined it for me. First, the cursor jumps around like crazy. I have been playing for a week and have not figured out how to predict when I’m going to accidentally overwrite my work. Second, and this is sadly an issue with most word games not created by hand, the word list is garbage. If I wanted to play Scrabble, I’d play Scrabble. Otherwise, I never want to see CAPH, SAN or MAS anywhere near a solution. Sorry I tried
excellent, clever game. some puzzles can be quite tricky, good ramp in difficulty throughout the week. no ads even if you don’t pay, though the unlock fee for the rest of the puzzles is quite hefty. only suggestion to the dev that would make this 5 stars: navigation is clunky and frustrating; the cursor moves randomly on keypress and makes you type over stuff. one way to make it better: the cursor should *never* move to an already-filled square if there are still empty squares in the block.
I like the game itself, but the app is slow and glitchy. It took over a minute just to get past the blue screen at the beginning and to continue after each game. I have to click each button at least twice for them to work, and letters disappear momentarily after filling in a word. Edit: I’m only able to play 10 games before having to pay?
This concept is solid: it’s like kenken/killer sudoku meets crosswords. Like many published crosswords, puzzles are easiest on Monday and get more difficult later in the week. They can be challenging, but it’s satisfying to see them finally come together. A quibble: I’ve seen two puzzles where the same word and a variant were in a crossing: OH/OHS and ELK/ELKS. This feels like bad construction: editors for crosswords don’t like variations of a word in the same puzzle, let alone in a crossing.
Love the game, but it drains the battery very quickly. It needs more puzzles. I’m out. Needing two clicks to enter a puzzle while every other button only requires one click is an interface faux pas, in my opinion. It takes way too long for the DONE button to appear after you’ve completed a puzzle.
I really enjoy the game but it opens my bluetooth on my phone and then it will totally close out my phone like a reset does. Very very disturbing!!!!!! I don’t like that it turns my bluetooth on, and I dunno maybe it’s a time thing if I’m taking too long to complete the puzzle? Wish it did’t do this because I’m ready to delete due to this issue. I have a LG Stylus 5 by the way.
It’s ok. I can’t deny it’s a lot of fun, but the asking price for the exclusive content is absurd. I turned off audio, because the sounds were super annoying. Filling in the letters can be tedious even after understanding it’s population method. Also, the hints can be vague at times.
Perfect puzzle game. Extremely simple but challenging. Combines the best aspects of crosswords and sudoku. Interface is snappy and pleasant, with thoughtful quality of life features everywhere. Monetization is ideal – some free content, loads of additional paid content for a single fair price. Looking forward to playing this for years to come. Wishlist: reduced dictionary with fewer S endings; themed puzzle events throughout the year; additional “Twist” modes; option to have no 2-letter words.
I enjoy the game itself but I am experiencing a lot of freezing up. I’ve gotten up to the “negative qualities” board but it keeps freezing. Sometimes when I close and reopen the game, a lot of work is lost. Please auto save more frequently. I am on a OnePlus 6. Will update review once the freezing is resolved. Thanks.
Excellent concept. Excellent execution. Some glitches in the beginning but they’ve been addressed and I appreciate how much thought went into the UX. The advanced user input was especially well designed. i have 3 feature requests. 1. A reset puzzle button 2. When in “no feedback” mode, turn off word shimmer/dictionary so it doesn’t give hints 3. Optional feedback mode toggle between none & valid for ppl who want to play in “none” mode but occasionally use valid if I can’t find the mistake
Great puzzles, great idea, definitely worth the 12 dollars for the extra puzzles! The app is a little buggy though, it crashes every now and then and there needs to be a way to lock the screen (it rotates on Android even with screen rotate turned off, and the puzzle is too small to actually use when rotated).
Edit 18th May: still lovving this game, and im not running into the issues i was before! Orig: Loving this game so far! but running into issues on puzzles that introduce new concepts, ala themes, or even the first twist puzzle, wherein the timer doesnt start and so the game never ends, unless you exit out and return. Another issue, especially with Apr. Standard – Body Parts, is that the game freezes constantly, restting progress and somehow hints as well.
Love it when it is working. I’m even adapting to the wikidefinitions, Sporadically super buggy where slow response time makes it exceedingly frustrating. Resizing the grid makes it too big or too small when buggy. Cursor disappears for seconds. Hitting a key repeatedly out of frustration minimizes the grid. ARGH.
Challenging game, and very well designed! Also, I had a suggestion, which I emailed the developers, and they updated the app 3 days later with the fix. I’m so impressed and happy. I love this game. It’s difficult, but really fun. I really appreciate that it gives us color themes to pick from, too.
The game, wonderful. However, the other reviews raise good points about UI responsiveness and the phone heating up. After playing for an hour (again, good game!) I switched to a different app and noticed what i thought was screen burn in, clearly seeing discolorations in the shape of the hint label, undo button, and backspace button. Over time (another hour) they faded away, so no harm (related to the heat issue? Maybe?) but be aware. This is a 1yr old moto g power which has an IPS LCD screen.