Game: Mini Words Collection
Genre: Word Puzzle, Education
System: Switch (also separately on Steam (Windows, Mac))
Developer|Publisher: Mens Sana Interactive | QUByte Interactive
Age Rating: US E | EU 3+
Price: US $3.99 | UK £3.59 | EU € 3,99
Release Date: March 24th, 2022
Review code provided with many thanks to QUByte Interactive
In this Mini Words Collection, you will get 3 different games, and each will help the player to improve their language skill, discover more words and practice their vocabulary. Plus, they are nice puzzlers too! The collection consists of the classic Mini Words, Pathfinders: Mini Words and Mini Words: Polyglot. The Word puzzles that are part of this collection have each been released separately before on Steam, but for the first time they are available as a collection on the Nintendo Switch. A perfect home for the game, with its touch screen! Here at LadiesGamers we reviewed Mini Words and Pathfinders: Mini Words before.
Mini Words
Mini Words is charming. It features 721 words to find, and each is its own puzzle. The game starts very slowly, giving the player ample room and time to figure out how everything can connect before throwing slightly harder puzzles at them. After that, a new concept is added, and players can puzzle through those for the next few levels and so on.
This integrated tutorial makes the game a little slow to start but is a fantastic way to introduce concepts without info-dumping or overwhelming the player at the start.
Mini Words has a minimal design but is a unique take on the word searching genre, the player experience is much improved now that you can use touch instead of clicking in the Steam version. (Read the full review of the game on Steam by Mina here)
Pathfinders: Mini Words
Though the gameplay is basically the same as in Mini-Words some aliens are looking to learn English this time. These little critters display images and are looking for you to fill out the English word to teach them the local language. Pathfinder: Mini-Words is clearly designed with younger audiences in mind, but its puzzles are thoughtful, interesting, and get fairly challenging for the ages intended.
The puzzles begin simply with single words, but then ramp up in difficulty as the game progresses. In the 100 levels in this short title, Pathfinders: Mini Words will present players with multiple words, longer words, and words that share progressively more letters inside the puzzle. This makes mapping the words out much more difficult, as the player cannot cross over the same path twice. Plus, it has to be said that it can be difficult to determine what is depicted in the image for which you have to make the word.
Overall though this is a cute, fun and easy to pick up and play. (Read the full review of the game on Steam by Mina here)
Mini Words: Polyglot
This time, the word puzzles aren’t just aimed at learning more english words, it is aimed at improving your vocabulary in several other languages. In the package there’s Portuguese, Spanish, Franch, German, Russian and Italian.
At the start of the game you get one word (all nouns) in these languages and the letters to form the same word in English. Clicking on the (very small) arrows next to the language words shows the word in one of the other six languages. They are repeated in spoken word, so if your aim is to learn the language and hear how it’s pronounced, you can.
There are 300 puzzles to solve. Soon, more words are incorporated in the same puzzle and the difficulty goes. Problem is, the letters to form the English words are scrambled. The same letter can be used multiple times. As long as you don’t cross the lines formed between two letters already. This means it’s near impossible (for me at least) to make the English word without knowing one of the foreign words. I need an inkling of what English word I’m looking to be able to form it using the letters.
The idea is a nice one, to help players broaden the horizon of their vocabulary and learn the pronunciation at the same time. I do wonder if going about it in this way is going to work. Maybe it’s because I was more aimed at solving the puzzles than learning a language. On the other hand, even if you have solved all the puzzles and you are really interesting in learning Italian or one of the others, this is a nice way to learn some words. At least it helps you point out to the manager of the Campo that your are not satisfied with your spot and you have a Controversia!
Conclusion
Overall I can say for the price of a few euro you’ll have loads of word puzzles to play. And these are available to play on the go, making it even better. They should keep any word puzzle fan busy for a bit!
Final Verdict: I Like It a Lot