At first glance, Cursed Words feels deceptively familiar. You form words from tiles on a board, score points across a handful of rounds, earn money, and move forward. But that sense of order doesn’t last long. As score requirements climb and increasingly punishing bosses enter the picture, the definition of a “word” becomes more of a loose suggestion than a rule.

Before long, players are encouraged to bend—and outright break—language itself. Tiles expand beyond letters into chess pieces, poker hands, numbers, fractions, and abstract symbols that abandon any pretense of being readable. The game evolves into a full-on roguelike where the goal isn’t just spelling efficiently, but exploiting systems, stacking absurd synergies, and breaking the game wide open.

The demo features four playable characters, each with unique abilities that dramatically alter how scoring works. The full release will expand that roster to eight characters, alongside more than 200 stamps and stickers designed to push scores into ridiculous territory. Some characters don’t even rely on traditional word-building at all, further reinforcing that Cursed Words is less about spelling and more about controlled chaos.

One standout example is Nina Nix, whose Void tiles carry negative values but have a chance to transform into high-scoring shiny tiles. They’re risky, awkward, and initially frustrating—but with the right stamps or stickers, those odds can shift dramatically. It’s a perfect snapshot of how Cursed Words rewards experimentation and system mastery over strict rule-following.

“Why a word game?” asked Buried Things co-founder Niru Fekri-Arnold. “Because we’re really smart. And we’re British, so we sound even smarter than that.” He added that Cursed Words does, in fact, accept American words too—mercifully.

Forklift Interactive CEO Andrei Podoprigora contributed perhaps the most on-brand quote of the announcement, delivering a string of cursed symbols allegedly worth over 1200 points. What it means is unclear. That it scores well is apparently all that matters.

The Cursed Words demo is available now on Steam for PC, offering a strong taste of its bizarre, genre-bending approach. The full game is currently planned for release in 2026, and if the demo is any indication, it’s shaping up to be one of the strangest and most inventive takes on word-based games in years.