Star Wars Outlaws Cleverly Reinvents Wordle, Then Squanders It
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
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.
