Towers of Babble turns every word you spell into a tower

Spell AXE and you get a building that chops wood. Spell FORT and you get a tough tower with extra armor. Spell DOCTOR and you get a weak little tower that heals everything around it. That’s the whole idea behind Towers of Babble, and I love it.

It comes from Everybody House Games, the studio run by Frank, Hilary and James Lantz. If the name Frank Lantz rings a bell, it’s because he made Universal Paperclips, the browser game about an AI making paperclips that ate a lot of people’s evenings in 2017. The studio also made Babble Royale, which turned Scrabble into a battle royale.

Your vocabulary is your army

Towers of Babble plays like a tower defense game, except your building menu is a rack of letter tiles. You spell a noun, it becomes a building you can drop on the map, and its stats come from what the word actually means. Harvesters gather resources, towers hold off the waves, and adjectives and verbs turn into mods you can attach to buildings to boost them.

How do you give stats to every word in the dictionary? According to 80 Level, the developer used language tools like WordNet and Word2Vec to automatically assign abilities to around 200,000 words, then went through roughly 10,000 of the most common ones by hand so that, for example, SNAKE poisons things.

Every word is also a level

This is the part that got me. Each noun isn’t just a building, it’s a level too, generated from the word itself, and longer words make harder levels. Clear one and the word joins your collection, so you can bring that building into future fights.

There’s a nice competitive twist too. If you’re the first player to clear a level, your name is written on it for good, and if you hold the high score, the building that word creates gets a stat bonus. The level screen literally says “No one has cleared this level. You could be the first.”

121,683 levels, cleared together

Then there’s the big goal. The game has 121,683 levels split across eight difficulty tiers, and all players are working together to clear every one of them. You play as a Librarian of Babble, trying to recover the words an angry god threw into the void so humanity can rebuild its tower to heaven.

In the screenshots, the shared progress bar sits at barely half a percent, which gives you an idea of how big this is meant to be. I really like the idea of a whole community slowly filling in a dictionary together.

Worth a wishlist

Towers of Babble is planned for 2026 on Windows, Mac and Linux, and 80 Level reports that a demo is on the way. If you enjoy games where the rules are simple and the combinations never end, this is one to follow, and the Babble Royale pedigree makes me confident the word side of it will feel good.

While you wait, Cursed Words is a great roguelike word game you can play right now. And if what hooks you is building combos from simple pieces, our Balatro review and our list of the best roguelike deckbuilders are good places to go next.