Wordle review | PC Gamer

The cult of Wordle grows by the day. The game came into our lives under the cover of darkness, slowly contaminating my Twitter timeline since late 2021, promising nothing more than a puzzle that can be solved somewhere between 30 seconds or 15 minutes. You get six guesses to identify a five-letter word, and with each entry the algorithmic quizmaster reveals what letters are in the right space, what letters appear in the word but are slotted incorrectly, and what letters aren’t in the solution at all. (For instance, today I went from TRACE, to RIPEN, before landing on PERKY.) This is the sort of premise you’d expect to find on the back of tedious in-flight magazines, marooned alongside half-finished Sudoku grids, solved with a ballpoint pen in the clouds above Missouri. And yet, Wordle is an absolute phenomenon. I’ve been playing religiously for a month straight and have no interest in slowing down. It is an early Game of the Year favorite, neck and neck with Elden Ring. 

It’s difficult to say whether Wordle’s incredible success has more to do with its metacultural community than its gameplay principles. I mean, at its core, this is a great puzzle. The story goes that Wordle’s creator, a former Reddit software engineer named Josh Wardle, dreamt up the design to be a private ritual shared between him and his word game-loving wife. The two would go back and forth, solving the riddles in cloistered marital bliss, long before Wordle seeped out into the internet. But it is also true that Wordle is not an original idea. The game show LINGO basically operated with the same gimmick back in the mid-2000s, and if you are a veteran of languid after-school programs, you’ve likely suffered through some mind-numbing rounds of Mastermind while waiting for your dad to pick you up. (Mastermind subbed in letters for different colored pegs, but the overarching strategy was identical.) 

In that sense, Wordle’s ascent is pure chaos theory. Nobody could’ve predicted the zeitgeist; it is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The tides of virality are forever inscrutable, and sometimes it can lift up a musty old cipher to the top of the trending page.

But I don’t think Wordle’s lack of inventiveness really matters. Strangely enough, Wordle’s core appeal can be found in its magnificently ameliorating social vibes. Sitting down in front of my Wordle feels like getting pricked with a tranquilizing dart because, quite frankly, it’s difficult to untether any cultural artifact from the global catastrophes of the last two years. I started playing Wordle last December, in the dead heat of the Omicron wave; right as all of our daffy, post-pandemic euphoria was being humbled by the Almighty Variants. We were all back at square one, and I doubt I’m the only one who recalls that time as the ultimate nadir of our bleak, everlasting, recursive Covid journeys. Much like the many other pandemic phases, (sourdough starter, The Last Dance, guilt-free day drinking,) Wordle encapsulates a sense of effortless, blissed-out peace at a time when we’re all thirsty for it. Josh Wardle saliently added a share function to the end of every solution, which means that social media feeds are speckled with green, yellow, and gray boxes—almost like a way to compare notes with fellow Wordleheads. Some people deride that feature, comparing it to the darkest Farmville days on Facebook. But personally? I relish the chance to avoid discourse surrounding the virulent disease or the death of democracy, and instead simply discuss the daily word with the other strangers trickling through my feed.