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Letters & Sodas – an unusually tactile word game

Developer: Frosty Pop Games Inc.
Price: Free
Size: 145 MB
Version: 1.0.1
Platform: iPhone & iPad

Letters & Sodas

The aptly named Frosty Pop Games is known for creating cool and colorful digital confections. The developer’s latest effort, Letters & Sodas, is a fizzy little word game that continues the trend.

This nifty twist on the word jumble formula stirs in some neat tile sliding elements, though it’s perhaps a little too simplistic for serious word game freaks.

Spell out the provided word along the central row

Each puzzle takes place on a four-by-five grid, and tasks you with forming a particular four-letter word along the central row. In order to do this, you must touch and swipe on the provided letters to shunt them around the grid. However, you only have a limited number of moves in which to construct the word.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment here is that although it’s a decent puzzle game, Letters & Sodas isn’t particularly interesting as a word game. You’re fed each simple four-letter word from the start of the round, so your linguistic skills and vocabulary aren’t really called upon.

Locks constrain the grids considerably

Contrary to first impressions, then, this is very much a physics puzzler through and through. The conundrums are of the logistical variety, as you figure out how to shuffle one letter out of the way so as to make room for another.

After a while, you’ll start to encounter things like locks and portals that serve to constrain or open up the game field in new ways. These are fun little embellishments that certainly tickle some of the puzzler portions of your brain, but any word game itches will remain unscratched.

Portals let you teleport letters around

Back on the plus side, the app packs the kind of bright and fresh presentation we’ve come to expect from this developer. It’s a pleasing yet unshowy style with bold fonts and a clean UI. This is accompanied by a plinky-plonky soundtrack and pleasingly bloopy sound effects.

Our use of such twee language to describe the presentation of Letters & Sodas is somewhat fitting. This is a game that’s desperately eager for you to have a pleasant and friction-free time, and it succeeds at offering such an experience. There’s even the provision to skip a puzzle at the expense of watching an ad.

The presentation is crisp and unshowy

The cost of that amelioration, it seems, is a lack of anything meaty for word game fans to really chew on. But anyone seeking a quirky new casual puzzler with which to while away the hours will have a fair amount of fun.