Lost Words: Beyond the Page

Most games that tackle grief treat it as backstory: a dead parent that gives the hero a motive. Lost Words: Beyond the Page makes grief the whole subject, and it builds its mechanics out of the thing a grieving child reaches for first, which is language.

Sketchbook Games developed it, with credits shared by Sketchbook Developments and Fourth State. The script is by Rhianna Pratchett, whose past work includes Heavenly Sword and the rebooted Tomb Raider. The game tells two stories that run side by side. In the first you read the diary of Izzy, a young girl who wants to be a writer, and you walk across her handwriting. In the second you enter Estoria, the fantasy world Izzy is writing, where she becomes the guardian of a magical book. As things go wrong at home, with her grandmother’s sudden illness and everything that follows, the fantasy starts to bend around what’s happening in her life.

On the market, Lost Words sits with the short, auteur-driven narrative games that grew out of the post-Gone Home indie scene: Gris, Florence, What Remains of Edith Finch. It lasts only a handful of hours, the puzzles are gentle, and it’s fully voiced. It isn’t trying to compete with puzzle games on mechanical depth. It wants to be a book you walk through, and it should be judged on those terms. It deserves credit where that works and criticism where the game trips over its own genre.

• Diary pages you can walk on: In the real-world chapters, Izzy’s handwritten lines are the platforms. You pick up and rearrange words to open a path, so reading and moving become one action.
• Word spells in Estoria: In the fantasy chapters you collect words and cast them on the world. “Rise” lifts rocks, “break” shatters obstacles and “repair” rebuilds bridges.
• Two stories that mirror each other: Events in Izzy’s diary reshape the fantasy she’s writing, and the two halves echo each other more and more as the story goes on.
• Hand-painted watercolour art: 2D-styled worlds rendered in 3D, so every scene looks like an illustration from a storybook.
• Orchestral score by David Housden: Music by the BAFTA-nominated composer, plus a fully voiced cast.

The Core Idea: Language as Level Design

The central idea is strong, and it lands right away. In the diary chapters, the text isn’t something laid over the level. The text is the level. You jump from one sentence to the next, and when a gap gets in your way you pull a word off the page and drop it where you need a foothold. Because walking a line means reading it, the game controls how fast you take in each sentence without cutscenes or locking your controls. A sad line takes longer to cross, and the pause in your movement matches the pause in the thought.

It’s a good piece of design, and the game uses it best in the quiet moments. When Izzy’s writing gets shaky, the platforms get shaky too. When she can’t find the words, the path runs out. Few games tie mechanics and meaning together this closely, and these pages are the strongest part of the design.

Estoria: Where the Loop Thins Out

The fantasy chapters get less out of the idea. Estoria runs on a more familiar setup: move through a side-view world, find a glowing obstacle, pick the right word from Izzy’s book, cast it. Rise, break, repair. The mapping is clear and clever the first time, and it expresses the game’s thesis neatly. A child who can’t fix her real world gets a world she can fix with words.

The trouble is that the vocabulary stays small and every puzzle has one obvious answer. There’s almost never a reason to think about which word to use, because the environment practically announces it. There’s no combining words, no playing on their meanings, and no way to fail that teaches anything. After a while the loop becomes: look at the glowing object, cast the matching verb, move on. The puzzles come across as easy and the platforming as slow and short on mechanics.

That’s the game’s biggest missed opportunity. A system built on language is well suited to ambiguity, where a word could mean two things and the story could go either way. Lost Words keeps choosing the literal reading.

Movement and Pacing

Izzy moves deliberately, which suits the diary chapters and drags in Estoria, where there’s more ground to cover and not much happening in between. It doesn’t make the game feel clumsy, but it does make it feel padded. With a short runtime, any stretch that feels slow stands out.

The Writing Carries It

Pratchett’s script is the reason to play this. It avoids the easy route, where the grandmother is a saintly symbol and her illness is just a plot device. Izzy’s diary reads like a real child who is precocious, a bit self-important about wanting to be a writer, and caught off guard by feelings she doesn’t have words for yet. The fantasy story works as her coping mechanism, and the way it slowly warps as her real life gets harder is handled with restraint. The game never spells out what Estoria stands for. It trusts the player to notice.

The voice acting supports that. The performances are warm without being sentimental, and the game gives its hardest scenes room instead of rushing to comfort.

Onboarding and Difficulty

There’s almost no friction at the start. The game teaches its mechanics through the story, and the design leaves little room to get stuck. For a narrative-first audience, including younger players and anyone working through grief of their own, that’s a deliberate and fair choice. Anyone who comes looking for real puzzles will run out of challenge well before the game ends.

The watercolour look is consistently lovely. Estoria’s backgrounds have the soft edges and colour bleed of real paint on paper, and the 2D-in-3D rendering gives scenes some depth without losing the storybook feel. The diary pages look right too: lined paper, childish handwriting, and doodles in the margins that feel like a real notebook.

The interface stays out of the way. The word book is easy to read and quick to open, and the game rarely buries the art under menus. Housden’s orchestral score is the strongest single part of the production. It builds carefully and pulls back when a scene needs quiet, which fits the subject matter.

On the technical side, this is a small 2.5D game that doesn’t ask much of the hardware, so a 2D game of this scope should sit lightly on most machines.

Steam: This is the version for anyone who wants the art at its sharpest. It’s a slow side-view game, so a gamepad fits it better than mouse and keyboard, and precise input never matters much. The low hardware demands mean it should run comfortably on modest PCs.

Nintendo Switch: The game suits the Switch well. A quiet, short, story-heavy game works nicely in handheld mode, and holding the screen close makes the diary chapters feel more personal, a bit like reading an actual notebook. The watercolour style also hides the resolution drop you get in handheld better than a sharper, more detailed style would. On a big TV the soft art holds up, although the text-heavy diary pages are easier to read up close.

On both platforms the controls are forgiving enough that the platform barely affects how it plays. Pick whichever one suits four quiet hours better.

Lost Words: Beyond the Page has one great idea, and the idea is that language itself is the space you move through. In the diary chapters it works beautifully: reading and moving blend together, and the game’s feelings come through in its layout. Estoria doesn’t live up to that. It turns the idea into a plain lock-and-key loop that rarely tests or surprises.

Criticizing it for being a weak puzzle game partly misses the point. It’s an interactive story first, and as one it works. Pratchett’s script treats a child’s grief seriously, Housden’s score earns its emotional moments, and the watercolour art makes the whole thing feel handmade. It’s not a mechanical standout, but it’s a moving one, and we recommend it to the right audience: story-first players with an evening or two to spare.