Absurdle is like Wordle but it fights back

(Image credit: qntm)

Once-a-day word puzzle Wordle is a sensation, which has unsurprisingly led to a number of imitators. Some are fine, like Wheedle, which lets you play as many puzzles per day as you like (and is free). Some are awful, like the creep who created a paid app called Wordle and tried to rip people off before crumbling under the collected ire of the internet.

But here's a legitimate twist on Wordle called Absurdle. Like Wordle, it picks a secret five letter word you need to guess, and lets you know which letters you've correctly guessed each time you attempt to solve it. But unlike Wordle, Absurdle changes its mind.

Billed as an "adversarial variant" of Worlde, Absurdle will change its secret word with each guess you make, but keep intact the letters you've correctly guessed. So if you guessed BUTTS and got the U correct, Absurdle will choose a different secret word that still contains that U. The result is a morphing solution that makes it feel like you're always getting closer to solving it, but will continue to change until you've nailed down all its moving parts (or until it runs out of different words that keep your correct letters intact).

There's a much more comprehensive explanation from its creator, qntm (who also made an evil version of Tetris called Hatetris). The point is, it's considerably more dastardly than Wordle, but at least you get infinite guesses and you can play as often as you like. It's free and it's fun—and it's frickin' hard—so try to squeeze in a few rounds when you've completed your daily bout of Wordle each morning.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.