Do you remember the brain training craze of the mid-00s? I became an adult around that time, and suddenly it felt like everyone was telling me to look after my brain properly to combat ageing. Big Brain Academy, Brain Age: Concentration Training, and Dr Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? permanently changed the way I saw puzzles. Puzzles aren't just fun. They're healthy. They're good for you. It's never too early to start!
Over the years, I left the word puzzles behind. My love of puzzle games went in a different direction; I preferred solving murder mysteries and unlocking hidden secrets in mansions, rather than filling out crosswords. Which is why Rita took me by surprise. I forgot how much I enjoy a simple word puzzle. (Although 'simple' is a subjective word in itself. I'm sure the full game will be much more difficult in the later stages.)
You begin the game as an egg waiting to be hatched, rolling around on a beach. As you roll, you will collect letters; these can be used in a crossword to spell out the titular character. Rita. A plucky little chicklet in the calming, peaceful town of Aspendale. As Rita, you'll be mostly hunting down letters, so you can solve your current crossword and explore more of the world around you.
Solving part of the crossword - for example, using your letters to spell 'jump' - will unlock both abilities and new areas. Soon, you'll be scrambling up trees, jumping on buildings, and searching every corner for new letters to use. Obstacles range from broken elevators to a lack of money to pay for running shoes. Finding the right words is the key to progression. The main aim of the demo section is to locate your twin and return him to your mother; this is done by gradually collecting the letters F - O - L - L - O - W, at which point he will be able to trundle along after you, happily reuniting with mama chicken.
You'll also collect feathers on your journey, which bob about like the quills in Yooka-Laylee. Feathers unlock special otherworldly stages, called Memories. These puzzles stretched me a little more. (I won't lie. One of them stumped me for quite a while.) You'll need to get to the end of the Memory, but that involves crossing obstacles by solving word searches. It can be as simple as 'BRIDGE' to get you from one side to the other, and then progresses to slightly more outside-the-box thinking. For example, in a later Memory, you need the wordsearch to highlight both the current step you're standing on and the next one too, which means you'll need to highlight the letters in a particular order. It's simple but very satisfying to make it to the other side. (And as tempting as it is to just type JUMP or FLOAT or similar, you won't have the letters for that.)
When you finish a Memory, you'll be rewarded with surprisingly poignant Life Lessons. 'Do you notice that the older generations are never in a rush?' it says. 'Although Rita did have her troubles, she never got too far ahead of herself.' The game starts in 1933, and the full game will span her entire lifetime. I would love to see more of Rita's little pearls of wisdom. As she continues on her adventure, you can follow along in the local newspaper. It's a sweet story for a simple puzzle game about words; you get to follow Rita's legacy from beginning to end.
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The game has an old-school platformer vibe to it, which feels very comforting to me. Something about collecting chunky letters floating in the air reminds me of games from my '90s youth, which is always a bonus to me. Outside of nostalgia, though, it's a gentle game. It's the kind of thing I would like to dip into to soothe my frazzled nerves.
Rita's full game will contain other puzzles, like REBUS puzzles and anagrams, so it will be interesting to see how the difficulty progresses, and what kind of hint system (if any) it will have. Hint systems in a game like this are difficult to get right; it's hard to offer just enough help without giving things away completely. From what I've seen, I think the full game will offer a light touch when it comes to hints, but that remains to be seen for sure.
Playing Rita has taken me back to my Big Brain Academy days. As I've moved through my own life, the many adventures (and misadventures) I have had pushed the idea of brain health out of my mind. Even 2005-me could never have imagined how instant and fast-paced, distracting, and instant 2025 would be. Games like Rita may just help combat the brain rot, and I'm here for it.
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