MasterSwords

Edited April 28, 2025

In 2014, Asymmetric was hired to make a version of Word Realms for kids, with an educational and vocabulary-building focus. The company was developing curriculum software to deploy to tablets in elementary schools, and part of the project was a suite of games. They saw a bunch of kids playing and enjoying Word Realms when we were exhibiting it at IndieCade, and realized what we had not -- that we had, in fact, made a kids' game, despite my insistence on trying to make it much darker in tone than our other work.

In a lot of ways, this turned out way better than Word Realms, and it was definitely a turning point for Asymmetric -- we used the money we got for this to make West of Loathing.

You can't buy it anywhere anymore, and I hated the idea of it getting lost entirely, so I asked our crackerjack Unity programmer to make a web build, at https://masterswords.asymmetric.net/.

It's made for touch screens, so a lot of stuff that ought to be mouseovers is instead invoked via the loathsome long-click.