Star Wars Outlaws Cleverly Reinvents Wordle, Then Squanders It

Remember Wordle? The daily word puzzle mobile game was a massive hit in 2021 and 2022, dominating Twitter feeds with players' viral scorecards and inviting the whole world to try to guess the same word of the day, every day. The game grew so big it was eventually purchased by the New York Times and today helps fill out the newspaper's popular New York Times Games app.

I didn't expect to find Wordle in Star Wars Outlaws, but when it showed up as a hacking minigame, I felt it was a clever reinvention of the puzzle game that many continue to play each day with their morning coffee, during a lunch break, or just before they tuck into bed for the night. Unfortunately, like a lot of open-world games, Outlaws soon ruins its novel idea by cramming it into every corner of its world and missing the point of the game in the first place.

The principles are all there, though they're tweaked for various difficulties and given a space-fantasy makeover. As Kay Vess, you have a set number of attempts to "slice," or hack, a passkey of usually three to six characters using a library of symbols, and you have to get the right symbols in the right order. When you use a symbol not found in the solution, it's discarded; when you use a correct symbol, but in the wrong place, its color changes to yellow; and when you get the symbol exactly where it should be, it's colored in with green. To anyone who has played Wordle, this is unambiguously that.

That's cool, right? It is! Until it isn't. Wordle works for many reasons, but one of its most appealing qualities is its once-daily format. It's a brief, not especially difficult, time-filler of a puzzle game. You don't have to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy it--in a family group chat, my otherwise non-gaming parents still send me and my siblings their scores each morning. It has a low barrier for entry and makes for a fun social challenge. Did you get today's puzzle in four tries, or perhaps fewer, or more? How long is your streak, anyway? It's lightly competitive, simple to play, and doesn't ask for much of your time.

Star Wars' Outlaws version of Wordle is none of these things, and after just a few rounds of Star Wordles, that became painfully obvious. Mechanically, it is identical to Wordle, so it's not as though the developers messed that up. But they seemed not to consider all these other qualities that make Wordle work so well.

There's no competitive element in Outlaws' hacking minigame. It's a solo action-adventure game, so there's no sharing scores or streaks here. The difficulty also varies according to the story, so sometimes the puzzles are actually too easy, like needing only three characters from a small bank of symbols. But worst of all, and really the reason I'm writing this, is how frequently this game makes you play Wordle.

It's unfathomable to me how someone a few years ago saw the success of Wordle and thought, "You know what would be fun? Doing this dozens of times in our game." I don't have an exact figure for how many times Outlaws put its hacking minigame in front of me, but it feels like it was far too many for a game that took me 17 hours to beat. It can take much longer and surely involves even more Wordle for those who put in the extra hours.

Looking back on my time with Outlaws, it's fair to estimate having played Wordle 3-4 times per hour in my playthrough. This comes off as an absurd gameplay loop even as a standalone point, but it's also emblematic of the genre's (and arguably the publisher's) legacy woes. Reinventing Wordle as a hacking minigame is a neat idea. Forcing me to play Wordle dozens of times in one playthrough is just a new book cover for a story players have read too many times before; it's open-world fluff.

These massive projects must give players the dozens of hours of gameplay they expect when they pick it up for $70 or more, so all of that environmental width has to be filled in somehow, even if it ultimately feels an inch deep. Sometimes, that can resemble repetitive towers to climb. Other times, it may take the form of useless feathers to chase. Star Wars Outlaws proves it can even look like already-famous (and, until now, enjoyable) puzzles to solve.

Wordle's ubiquity in the real world is why the idea works initially. Everyone knows Wordle, even if they don't play it anymore or never did. But to make the puzzle game similarly ubiquitous in a video game's setting misses the point, squanders the attempt, and leaves me, like many open-world games do, feeling like I'm wasting my time.

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