{"id":2242108,"date":"2026-11-06T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2242108"},"modified":"2026-11-06T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T15:00:00","slug":"dane-cook-and-robert-bowling-announce-vicious-vocab-a-genre-bending-word-game-with-a-big-twist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2242108","title":{"rendered":"Dane Cook and Robert Bowling Announce Vicious Vocab, a Genre-Bending Word Game With a Big Twist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ex-Call of Duty<\/a> creative strategist Robert Bowling and comedian Dane Cook have revealed a brand new, genre-bending video game known as Vicious Vocab, exclusively to IGN.<\/p>\n

Vicious Vocab is a genre-bending spin on casual word games like Scrabble, Words With Friends, and Wordle, with a big twist. While Bowling and Cook are careful not to share much about the twist to preserve some surprises, the game goes well beyond mixing and matching letters to make new words. The words have power and meaning\u2026 and they can dramatically change not only what happens to you, but the entire genre of game that you\u2019re playing. <\/p>\n

Check out the trailer below to get an idea of the unexpected shift that happens in Vicious Vocab.<\/p>\n

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Made by a team of five people who collectively call themselves \u201cfuncool games,\u201d Vicious Vocab is described as \u201cScrabble meets Balatro<\/a> in a backroom casino.\u201d On its own, it\u2019s a fun twist on the word game genre. There\u2019s an action element, which has led the team to referring to the game as a \u201cword brawler\u201d or, in Cook\u2019s words, a first-person speller. <\/p>\n

You can \u201ctake damage\u201d based on certain words. You can then counter it with another word, so long as you have the right letters. For instance, as seen in the trailer, if you spell out \u201ctorch\u201d or \u201cfire,\u201d you might take fire damage. You can then spell out \u201cwater\u201d or \u201cice\u201d and extinguish the flame to stop yourself from taking more damage. These effects add interesting layers to the expected mechanics of a word game.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat’s something you don’t get in normal word games,\u201d said Bowling when speaking with IGN. \u201cBuilding systems that work against systems that work against other systems. When you’re four layers deep in a combo, that is the stuff that really makes you feel like, ‘Am I playing a word game anymore?’ I know I’m making words, I know I’m using letters, but the sort of chaining of events you can get yourself into really sort of that’s when you start breaking out of one genre and start making something new.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Vicious Vocab (Provided by funcool games)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, as the trailer reveals, Vicious Vocab can shift in an incredibly unexpected direction, taking it from a cozy game your mom might play casually on the couch to something in line with The Stanley Parable. If you play the right words, you can move away from the word board and have an entirely new experience that you would’ve never anticipated.<\/p>\n

“We both want to create holy s**t moments,” said Cook. “We want to create memorable moments.”<\/p>\n

Although there are plans to add multiplayer to the game at some point, it is a single-player narrative driven game. If you want to, you can just stick to the more traditional word game and play that \u201cinfinitely,\u201d but the game also expands in a whole other direction beyond that.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re building out a very deep single player experience that has over 20 different narrative endings, lots of achievements, but the plan is to also expand into a multiplayer experience,\u201d said Bowling. \u201cSo there is going to be both. They go in very different directions though, where the multiplayer experience is all about replayability and the single player experience is all about a lot of endings, still a lot of replayability. You can still play it infinitely, but there’s a lot more narrative to it that may or may not be in the multiplayer side of it. Think about it as a stem that breaks off into two directions and they get equally weird, but in different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pairing of an ex-Call of Duty developer and a comedian is one that may seem unlikely, but it actually dates back 20 years. The two met when Bowling was starting out as a community manager at Infinity Ward and somehow, this led to them playing Call of Duty 2<\/a> together. During a match of Capture the Flag, Bowling was impressed that Cook was actually a valuable asset who played the objective instead of mindlessly running around trying to farm kills. From there, a friendship was formed, which eventually led to Cook lending his voice to the \u201cbattle chatter\u201d (voice lines for characters yelling out commands and call outs in-game) in the Modern Warfare games.<\/p>\n

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