Game Classification

A coven of evil mages casts a curse upon a kingdom, transforming its citizens in half-animal monsters. The court sorcerer must fight back, reverting the effect of the curse on each individual with magical words by day, and crafting a counter-curse against the wizards at night.

Spellagories is a word guessing game. The screen shows a cauldron with a cloud of green smoke hanging over it, where scrambled letters appear, and a clue written on the windowsill, usually a theme like gardening, anatomy and other subjects. The player has to create words by selecting the letters, by either typing them on the keyboard or clicking directly with the mouse, and submit them as guesses to the right answer. Valid but incorrect entries are stored at the left side of the screen, adding points to the score. The assembly of long and complex words is rewarded with a hint, showing the correct position of one of the letters from the secret word. Up to 10 hints can be stored as chalk markings on the spines of a book pile, and used by clicking on the crow sitting over them.

A cursed villager waits patiently on the window, with a setting sun moving slowly on the background as the timer. A sketch portrait of the citizen's original appearance, divided in sections and hanging on the right side wall, shows the progress of the cure, with each section filling up after one of the magical words is submitted correctly.

Three candles show the remaining lives as burning wicks. If the curse can't be lifted from the peasant before the sunset, the player loses one life. At night, the objective is to find words to create a curse against one of the mages. The portrait is replaced with a poster with runes markings, and each rune starts to shine with correct answers.

Sometimes a bonus game appears, where a scrambled word slowly starts to reveal itself, and the goal is to guess the correct subject from three choices, as fast as possible to get more points.

The game has two other modes. In the untimed mode, there's no pressure from the day cycle, and the player can take any time to cure the villagers. In the arcade mode, there's an endless procession of mutated villagers, and the goal is to achieve the highest score possible before using the last life. [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : PC (Windows)

Links

• http://www.mobygames.com/game/spellagories/