I am wary of indie games, as a rule. Well, I speak as if I have rules about videogames; I am dimly wary of games with low production values in our age. Of course, the current font of burbling freeware that is imaginative, witty and, most importantly, low-cost is something we should celebrate as a truly democratic process; the power is back in the hands of the people, and, surprisingly, there are lots of people that aren't creative plugholes.
However, as with any relatively new art-form, videogames seem to be going through a vacuous renaissance of abstraction; books and art had Dadaism, films had that Hungarian bloke who liked plasticine, and now we have a slew of indie videogames that posit that art is meaningless, and therefore that their art, their games, have no meaning, or objective, either.
This works somewhat more successfully for other mediums. Books and films are, by definition, not interactive; apart from maybe the books where you choose your story, and you hurriedly check behind you every five minutes to make sure that no-one saw you trace your steps back from page 38 when you were eaten by the demon chimichanga. They require witness, thought, opinion; they interact with you in your opinions. Videogames require some sort of interface; call me old-fashioned, as this certainly seems to be a view that is taking a beating currently. It is your control, in a world with set boundaries, that creates a videogames existence space. But a lot of indie games take the platforming, 2D spectre, or the mouse's hurried, all-clicking stratagems, and tack something that is beautiful, but stupid, onto it.



This is not always a bad thing; the above example, The Endless Forest, is a free-to-play, small-download wanderer, with no discernable objectives other than to graze and discover mysterious ruins, it's beauty, thoughfulness and creativity make it worthwhile. It is when these games are charged for that we find it a little off-putting.

Even though it does not fall into the above category, Bookworm Adventures, the full game, comes with a pretty hefty price tag, at £15. It is not an overly pretty thing, and the main game mechanic is so close to Scrabble as to be indiscernable. The RPG stylings are remarkably superfluous to the pure objectives of the game; you spell words to kill things. Bigger words make more hurty ow ow. But, there is a free-play version, and I am enjoying it immensely.

I first learnt of it from Penny Arcade, and I like to think I share the main character's verbosity and verbophilia; in fact, maybe it's just 'v' words. But I am English, I do an English degree and perhaps I feel a fatherly duty, a nascent alpha-male protective urge, towards my language, dismaying and biting my nails as I see it beaten, smeared in defecate, and forgotten every day on our fair Internet. I like long words. I studied Latin until I was sixteen. Laugh if you want. Language got roots, yo. And I know all about them. Or, I like to think so.

Bookworm Adventures succeeds in making you feel extremely stupid. You are given a set of tiles, which change with every enemy. Enemies have the ability to destroy some of your tiles, destroying your spectrum of high-scoring conjunctions. I imagine the game should be played like any other; find the high-scoring letters, link them into the longest, most damaging word possible, and move on to the next mythological bad-ass. I can't play it like this. I can't play to win. I play for satisfaction. I want to see a forgotten Hellenism, a relevant yet succinct and beautiful adjective that only describes one aspect of one species of bat in one cave in Lombardy, smack the opposition down like a librarian jackhammer. I want them to see my private education in their broken teeth. But I am at a loss. It seems I don't know many good words.



I just freeze up. The first few enemies, though weak, took me a lot longer to kill than it should have. I kept coming up with clever words, only to be missing one or two letters. It was as if the game saw my pretention, and decided to have a leisurely piss on it. "Fecundity" became "fcndity", I struggled to remember a good word with both an 'x' and a 'qu' in it, and I even resorted to "us" once.

However, as my confidence improved, so did my letter count. I upgraded to "tailor", "croupier", "quean" (a type of whore) and "fane". I took a cyclops out in two hits with a zesty combination of "zygote", followed by the suckerpunch of "aqua". See, the Latin was useful!

Then there was this boar. And the board hated me. I had very little health left, it was late at night, and the porcine cumbag was goring me more times than a Pamplona pinata. I needed a long word, one that combined the "Silver Letter" rating of 's' and 'm', with some of the vowels that were cluttering my board.

I tried every combination, but one kept reoccurring; an archaic but extremely offensive racial slur, one that I had only ever heard my grandfather use in common parlance, but that I was ashamed to even think of. My white man's guilt stepped up, and I continued to search. But, like an inevitable Damoclean n-word joke, I entered the word, and killed the boar. My race's shame had helped me get one step closer to the kidnapped princess. I had killed my enemy with ignorance.