Labsylle

The latest Playdate game from rae is Labsylle, a word game where you rearrange syllables to spell words. There are a few other word games on the system (Lexgrid comes immediately to mind), and I love that this one feels so much more… doable than many of them. There are hundreds of puzzles, and none felt impossible. But, it was nice to be reminded of words I haven’t thought about in decades, like when working through the math category.

Each set of puzzles is grouped into a “pak,” and all the words in the pak are related somehow, whether it’s “animals” or “outer space” or “four-syllable words.” They’re grouped by difficulty, too, and some paks have imposter syllables that don’t actually appear in the word and will have to be swapped out, or a syllable that will blow up if you swap it too much. The puzzles are timed and your moves are counted, but there’s no time limit or move limit (except, of course, on the bomb tiles), so you can retry the pak as often as you’d like for a lower/better score. Also, you can save a puzzle at any point, so it’s very good to pull out at any idle moment during your entire life. It kind of feels like a Picross or Polarium in that respect.

So, the actual gameplay: you are presented with a word broken up into its syllables. You rearrange these syllables with the crank, one pair at a time, until the word you’re looking for appears, then push “up” on the d-pad to send it off before being presented with a new one. Since you’re only switching two syllables at a time, there doesn’t seem to be much room for keeping your number of swaps down once you figure out what word it is you’re supposed to spell, but there is a mode with online leaderboards that tests how many words you can spell in 60 seconds. Once you get really good at the main game, this is a great place to burn a few fast-paced minutes.

Since the words are from all across the breadth of human experience, this feels like it’d be a great game for almost anyone (okay, maybe not babies). You might even run into a word you’ve never heard before, but hopefully – with enough swaps – you’ll be able to figure out what it should be, and what sounds right. There’s no penalty for guessing! And how many games will have you remembering concepts from a calculus class you took over two decades ago? It’s another rae hit for the Playdate.

(Releasing February 17, 2026, on Catalog and Itch. Copy provided by developer.)