There has been some significant news in the video game world recently: Destiny 2 is winding down after nine years, PlayStation may stop releasing flagship single-player games on PC, and Microsoft wants us to shout every time we type XBOX. But the biggest news for me is that I have found my new favourite word game. I am bold enough to call it the new Wordle.
What Is Ribbit?
Ribbit is one of the varied daily games on Puzzmo, an online puzzle platform. It launched at the beginning of January, but I only recently discovered it because I have been unwell, bored, and spending too much time on my phone. Puzzmo’s daily hits include a satisfying shape-arranging game, variations on chess that make me feel extremely stupid, and pleasing word games, which are my favourites. Circuits has you making connections between the beginnings and ends of phrases (e.g., “stone cold > cold medicine > medicine cabinet”) as fast as you can. Bongo gives you a bunch of letter tiles and asks you to arrange them for a maximum score.
But none of them compares to Ribbit. It gives you a maze of letters connected by lines, and you have to find the words hidden within them. If you like Spelling Bee or Wordscapes, you will love this. What sets Ribbit apart is its clever visual design. You can see how the letters are supposed to connect, which means each word you find eliminates other possibilities. If you find all the words with a particular letter in them, that letter turns into a happy little frog. As you keep finding words, the screen fills with frogs until eventually you find them all, and then the frogs sing to you.
Why Ribbit Is Special
One word is always especially long: I found hippocampus in a recent puzzle in under a minute and experienced a rush of bliss comparable to the first sip of a cold pint on a sunny day. I find it inordinately entertaining for something so seemingly simple, exactly the way Wordle was back in 2022. It is a perfect 10-minute daily moment of feeling competent and intelligent. The frogs, when they appear after a successful move, reflect my own smugness right back at me. Who does not want to start or end their day by filling their phone screen with contented-looking colourful amphibians? I reckon Puzzmo needs to provide a way to share results involving many frog emojis to kickstart the virality that Wordle’s green, grey, and yellow cubes inspired on Twitter.
Ribbit as a Screentime Swap
Ribbit is also a perfect example of a “screentime swap” – a way of using your phone that does not make you feel like your brain is being slowly poisoned. Realistically, quitting our phones is not going to happen for most of us because of jobs and school class WhatsApp groups. But reintroducing even a little intentionality into how we use our phones can have a transformative effect, keeping us away from attention-draining algorithmic content and mindless scrolling. Playing a puzzle instead of scrolling a feed before I get out of bed in the morning makes me feel markedly better.
Worthwhile games do not always occupy entire evenings, weekends, or months of our lives. Sometimes they exist in little moments between everyday life. When I interviewed the people who make Candy Crush a couple of years ago, they took pride in occupying that space. “It does not interfere or compete with something else that is important in your life. It fits into small pockets of your day. And solving small problems is a uniquely interesting thing to human beings,” said Paula Ingvar, head of Candy Crush’s sibling game Soda Saga. “It is great to start your day by winning at something. The latest research we have on mental health is that if you achieve something small, you are ready to tackle something bigger.”
Ribbit is my current little win. Get in on it now – if I have anything to do with it, it is about to leap into the big time.
What to Play
If you are not currently roaring through a virtual Tokyo in a Forza Horizon supercar, might I suggest this adorable and unusual new puzzle-platform game starring Nintendo’s friendly dinosaur? Yoshi has been the star of some of Nintendo’s best offbeat adventures, and this imaginative new adventure, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, is much cleverer than its cuteness may suggest. As Yoshi travels through the pages of an anthropomorphic nature encyclopedia, meeting the creatures described within, developer Good-Feel throws creative ideas around with wild abandon. A particularly appealing game if you have children who will watch you play and contribute puzzle-solving suggestions. Available on: Nintendo Switch 2. Estimated playtime: 15 hours.
What to Read
My little son has been greatly enjoying the new Lego Batman game, which contains a late-game reference to a sketch by iconic Scottish comedian turned Twitch streamer, Limmy. His on-stream reaction made my day. A forthcoming new version of Unreal Engine – Epic’s game development engine, which powers probably half the games you have ever played – was shown off at the Rocket League championships over the weekend. Football-playing RC cars have never looked this good. For years, we have been trying to arrive at a consensus regarding what we should call games such as Vampire Survivors and Ball x Pit, where you mow through escalating waves of enemies using power-ups that turn you into a death-dealing bullet-dispenser. Alas, Steam has kind of settled the debate by introducing a “bullet heaven” tag. I still prefer my old idea: horde control. There is a Lord of the Rings RPG on the way from Kingdom Come: Deliverance studio Warhorse. This is extremely good news for Tolkien fans: Warhorse’s attention to detail is second to none.
What to Click
- Minecraft-playing grandma swatted when livestreaming to raise funds for grandson’s cancer treatment
- Screentime swaps: how to quit doomscrolling without quitting your phone
- 007 First Light – a triumphant James Bond game made by obsessive fans
Question Block
Reader James provides this week’s question: “What game characters or worlds would you like to see appear in spin-offs away from their regular genre? I would love to see Team Cherry have a go at a full-on Hollow Knight beat-em-up-style game. Who would not want to see how Grey Prince Zote would fare against Shakra?”
As a certified Hollow Knight enjoyer, I am absolutely on board with this idea. I really enjoy the Zelda Hyrule Warriors games, action-centric spin-offs from my favourite series that just let Link and companions be maximally badass; Nightmare Kart started out as a fan-made Bloodborne karting game. Inspired by the notoriously problematic Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, which took all the female characters from the series of fighting games and had them lounging around on a beach in revealing bikinis, I rather like the idea of taking the characters from Resident Evil and just putting them in a cosy game where they all get to hang out and have a nice relaxing time instead of murdering zombies. (Theoretically you could achieve this with some inspired character creation craft in Tomodachi Life.) Those guys need a break.
Readers: what are your suggestions for unlikely spin-offs? If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
