MacOS, VR, and Endless Content Updates – The Year in Review at Player1games

2023 is barreling headlong towards the exit. It’s just a hop, a skip, and a festive jumper from here and we’ll all be blinking in the white light of a new year. 

Before crossing that threshold it’s a good idea to take stock of everything we’ve achieved in the last 12 months. 

But instead of doing that we’re going to look at everything developer player1games has achieved, which is far more impressive. We called that it would have an impressive year back in March, and so it has proved.

Player1games is perhaps best known for its Linguist series of word games – titles we’ve raved about before – and the studio spent at least some of its time in 2023 ensuring that The Linguist: Word Craft stayed fresh with a regular diet of updates.

These updates tended to come in the form of new themes, along with new hidden words and accompanying visual effects.

The Linguist: Word Craft has come a long way since it first launched, acquiring bonus paths, daily scratchers, a daily word list, and—best of all—hidden pictures that you gradually reveal by clearing tiles. 

These join a trio of modes for every gaming mood, from the ultra competitive daily puzzle mode to the positively tranquil Free Play, which gives you ten minutes to get as many words as you can. 

This year, player1games expanded the Linguist brand with a whole new game. The Linguist: Word Sprint!, playable on mobile and MacOS, gives you a set of letters and challenges you to make as many words as possible containing them. 

As you play, new letters are gradually added to the prompt, introducing an element of strategy. It’s important to know which words to use and when. 

Meanwhile, every word you make adds another flower to the backdrop, and these contribute to your overall score. Certain flowers are linked to certain words, and typing these words affects the course of the game.

In addition to all that, The Linguist: Word Sprint sports a sprint mini-game designed to test your vocabulary, your typing skills, your reaction speed, and your ability to remain calm all at once. 

Our advice: everything is easier with a keyboard—which is why player1games has spent so much time this year bringing its games to MacOS.

Player1games’s other hit educational series is Mathletix, a series of games based on the different branches of math.     

Aimed at supporting younger learners with a series of fun, accessible, appropriately challenging, and colorfully presented mini-games, the series consists of separate apps for Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction, and so on.

This year, player1games used the power of simple addition to increase its stable of math games by exactly three. 

The newcomers are Mathletix Money, Mathletix Time Teller, and Mathletix Division. Each one has its own particular focus, but they all use the same user-friendly interface as the other games in the Mathletix brand. You can even buy them in bundles to save a bit of cash. 

So far, Mathletix is made up of six games and two bundles, all of them private, kid-safe, and demonstrably fun. And thanks to yet another update, they’re all MacOS compatible, so you can play them on big screens as well as small ones.

Finally, player1games has made a radical leap from kid-friendly casual titles into the brave new world of cooperative multiplayer virtual reality. 

BlokshotVR is a fully immersive arcade experience created for Oculus. It sees you and up to three other players lining up in a futuristic tunnel environment, blasting 3D blocks with a range of handheld weapons. 

Every block that you miss hits the side of the tunnel, chipping away at its structural integrity until it finally explodes, leaving you to fall helplessly to your doom. 

Which sounds like a pretty wild experience in VR. 

A bold departure like BlockshotVR was made possible by the growth of player1games over the last twelve months. 

You can expect even more expansion and experimentation next year, along with plenty of support for the studio’s existing library of fun, accessible titles.

Johnny Peterson