In a world of strange and varied magic, yours is the strangest of all. You are the Leximan, sole (to your knowledge) practitioner of Leximancy, a magic created by stringing words together and casting these words via your Lexicon. However, your strange magic caused you to be exiled to the basement of the magical Academy. You fear that you will never escape – until one day a rogue pyromancer attacks the Academy, beginning a journey of self-discovery, understanding the true power of your bizarre ability, and finding a place in a world hostile to all wizard-kind. And hats. Lots and lots of hats.
Leximan is a genre-defying adventure puzzler developed by Knights of Borria and published by Marvelous Europe. It is a humorous, fast-moving story, with each “Act” seeing Leximan and his allies faced with a new problem to solve, from defending the Academy against invaders to working menial jobs in the city simply to survive. It centers around Leximan’s word-based combat, where he casts words from the Lexicon to deal with everything from combat encounters to coffee orders.
Leximancy, the art of fighting with words, is the game’s greatest strength. Each encounter presents you with a different set of letters or letter clusters that you can use, allowing you to form different words and handle each interaction uniquely. The same combat can be resolved multiple different ways, ranging from the straightforward (setting your opponent on fire) to the bizarre (booping your opponent on the snoot, or impressing a foe with your politeness by offering coffee). You can even use your Leximancy to create words that have no effect on the fight whatsoever but result in hilarious little bonus scenes (such as asking an opponent his name and learning it mid-battle, and then later being able to summon the character in a different battle because you know his proper name and can cast it with your Lexicon).
Your word abilities can also be used in the game’s overworld, allowing for fun moments like using ENLARGE to increase your size and strength and bust open secret doors or summoning a COW to provide you and your friends with a source of food. These overworld spells also allow you to discover a large variety of secrets hidden in the world. I found these enjoyable for the most part, but there were a few times where I did come away quite frustrated because I knew there was a secret nearby, but could not figure out how to solve or activate it and the game provided extremely minimal hints. I did find myself wanting a more robust hint system in a number of places.
In addition to the Leximancy, there are sections of the game where gameplay changes very dramatically. It’s a bullet hell! It’s a “run and dodge projectiles” game! It’s an idle clicker! It’s a dungeon crawler! It’s a point-and-click adventure! It’s Frogger! It’s very chaotic, and you can never truly expect what’s going to happen next. While each of these sections were generally enjoyable (except the “run and dodge,” which I was terrible at and there were way too few checkpoints/defensive options), they paled in comparison to the Leximancy battles. Often times, I simply found myself wanting more Leximancy segments, and wishing there were more of them in place of the different gameplay sections. They are simply so good that nothing else could compare!
Leximan utilizes a pixelated art style with black-and-white characters over a colorful background that brings to mind titles such as Undertale. It’s a choice that fits well with the game’s cast of characters, allowing for both hordes of near-identical students and bizarre, memorable standout characters like Leximan’s close friend Wressa the alchemist. Pathfinding, however, is occasionally difficult as it can be hard to figure out what is a solid obstacle and what can be passed through, although the game does mitigate this with helpful arrows whenever possible. There are also a couple of bugs in the overworld – I got stuck in a wall at one point – but I suspect those will be ironed out quickly.
The characters, for the most part, are fun and pretty memorable. I really like Wressa, and wish she had gotten more focus overall, because I ended Leximan still feeling like I wanted to know more about her. Without giving too many spoilers, the pyromancer who attacks the Academy in Act 1 is also a really well-done character with definitely the most interesting arc of anyone in the game. Unfortunately, Principal Elementine, another of the major characters, is extremely un-enjoyable, with his short temper and constant rants getting old in his very first scene and then continuing to be prominent throughout. I dreaded every time Elementine appeared on the screen, and even though the character does have a sort of growth arc, it wasn’t enough to redeem him for me or make me not sigh heavily whenever he showed up yet again.
Overall, Leximan is a fun, quirky title that can be completed in about eight hours and will delight retro game fans with its classic art and music style and constantly changing gameplay. Its biggest weakness is, ironically, that it doesn’t take advantage of its greatest strength – the Leximancy battles are not frequent enough, and none of the alternative gameplay segments that replace them are not nearly as good. Its writing is mostly strong, with a few jokes that don’t land – primarily revolving around Elementine, whose gimmick is exhausting and makes certain segments of the game drag a bit with how simply annoying he is. It’s still a very good game, though, and every single one of the word battles is an absolute delight to play through. I’d be happy to see more word-combat games from Knights of Borria in the future – I loved being a Leximancer and want to fill my Lexicon with every spell possible!
Kate played Leximan on PC with a review code.
