This has been the busiest December for games in recent memory. This month alone, we’ve seen the massive launches of Marvel Rivals, Infinity Nikki, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Those games have probably sucked up all of your time and attention, and that’s on top of The Game Awards 2024 flooding gaming spaces with several new announcements. That has caused games like LOK Digital, which launched in the thick of all this, to fly under the radar.
LOK Digital is one of the best puzzle games released in a year full of outstanding ones. It’s a glorified word search for a fictional alien language, but it’s also ridiculously clever in how it bends its own rules to create some head-scratching puzzles. LOK Digital is a fitting game for the holidays, something that you can easily install and play on a laptop while hanging out with friends or family. It’s also a reminder to look outside the traditional gaming zeitgeist in its busiest moments. That’s often where some true hidden gems are waiting to be discovered.
Learning LOK’s language
LOK Digital is the video game adaption of a word search puzzle book created Blaž Urban Gracar that got a surprise release during Day of the Devs’ The Game Awards 2024 showcase. To solve a puzzle, players must blacken every cell presented to them by spelling out fictional words like “lok,” “tlak,” “ta,” and “lolo,” with the letters that appear on many of those titles. That’s easier than it sounds.
Letters have to be connected to spell out a word, and each word lets players black out cells after it is spelled. For example, spelling out “lok” always lets me — and requires me to — blacken out a single cell. When I spell “ta” I can select any letter on the board and blacken all spaces with that same letter. As solving a puzzle requires players to black out all cells perfectly, sometimes the most obvious spellings I would see in my initial word search weren’t the ones required to complete the puzzle.
Throughout its handful of level sets, LOK ingeniously presents spins of its mechanics and ideas. Learning how to connect letters across large gaps or place letters of my own on blank cells after spelling out the word “be” were game-changers. It provides the same kind of satisfaction I get from doing well in The New York Times games like Wordle, Spelling Bee, or Connections. If you’re someone who plays those games every day, LOK Digital is an easy recommendation.
Word searches, evolved
Word searches are some of the most straightforward puzzles out there, so I love that LOK finds a way to put a novel spin on it. Its smartest decision is to give all players a level playing field by using a fictional language. I always instantly understood what I needed to look for at the start of the puzzle and felt whisked away to my own little mind palaces as I attempted to solve any puzzle it threw at me.
I understood the hold LOK had on my brain after solving one head-scratching puzzle. I caught myself saying, “Oh, it’s Lok, Lok, Lok, Ta,” out loud when nobody was around, speaking a fake language for no one. Despite that, that sentence meant something to me as I was then able to quickly solve that puzzle and move on to the next one. That’s a clear sign of how intellectually stimulating LOK is, one I’ve connected with on a deeper level than I usually do with games like it.
With more complex puzzles for me to still solve and challenging daily puzzles, I can see LOK becoming the next Mini Motorways for me. By that, I mean it’s a minimalist puzzle game I can boot up and play on my laptop or desktop when I have nothing else to do, something I’ll probably be feeling a lot around the holidays this year. It’s not the biggest game of the month by any means, but it may just be the game that sticks with me for the longest out of anything that came out around it.
LOK is also the only game I can universally recommend to players of any skill level. Once you learn the 15 words that make up its language, you’ll have all the tools to do as well as me.
LOK Digital is available now on Steam. The book version of the game is also available to purchase or download as a PDF online.