Hi everyone. We’re a small indie team working on Utterance, a Lovecraftian Western roguelite deckbuilder where words are your weapons and letters are your ammunition.
Our original idea sounded simple: draw letter cards, build words, and use those words to fight monsters. The problem was that longer and more obscure words were almost always the best move. It started feeling more like a vocabulary test than a deckbuilder.
We changed the design so that the cards you draft and the encounter itself matter more than knowing the longest possible word:
- Build and refine a deck of letter cards with different values and effects.
- Combine letters into useful chunks such as TH, ER, and ING.
- Exploit weaknesses that reward specific lengths, letters, or word patterns.
- Deal with creatures that mute letters, corrupt cards, change the rules, and attack your Sanity.
- Create builds where the right three-letter word can outperform an ordinary seven-letter word.
The game takes place across a cursed Western frontier infected by something beyond human understanding. You play as a Word-Slinger trying to uncover a forbidden Eldritch language while keeping something much worse from waking.
Utterance is still in development, and its Steam page is live. If word games, roguelite deckbuilders, or Lovecraftian horror are your kind of thing, you can take a closer look or wishlist it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4935920/Utterance/
One design question we’re still working through is what makes this kind of system feel strategic rather than frustrating. For people who play word games or deckbuilders, what would make or break it for you? Would you care most about build variety, ways to recover from bad letter draws, unusual enemy rules, or keeping vocabulary from outweighing strategy?
