Character Limit: New wordplay game launches in Welsh and English

Stephen Price

An entertaining new word game has launched on Windows and Mac, which allows players to use both English and Welsh.

Character Limit is a word game that’s all about balancing choice with time which has just launched thanks to Swansea-based indie studio Hotel Outlaw.

Starting off with an empty 12-tile rack, letters are automatically picked and placed, until it fills up. Players are tasked with having to make words and to follow the golden rule: Don’t Fill The Rack.

Players score by entering words, with longer words valued more, as are tougher letters. If the rack fills up, a countdown timer appears, giving a few precious seconds to submit a word and save the run.

To help, there are some assists including removing the first three letters on the rack, wildcards, and wiping all vowels. However, you only have a limited number of assists available, and you may not have any on hand if you struggle to find a word in time.

Over time, the rack fills up quicker, eventually leaving you with barely any time to come up with something. While you may find it easy to make big words early on, the fast pace later on makes things tricky.

The challenge modes add some extra spice. My favourite is “10 Second Tango” which forces you to submit a word in every ten seconds.

According to developer, Malcolm Owen: “It’s taken a year, way too much coffee, and a smidge of masochism, but we’re delighted (and sleep deprived and relieved) that multilingual word game Character Limit is now available on Steam, for Windows and macOS.

“You’ve got twelve spaces (your Character Limit. See what we did there?) and a never-ending supply of letters waiting to overwhelm you. Form words to clear space, score points, and survive as long as possible in this fast-paced, arcade-style typing puzzle.

“It’s simple… until it’s not.”

Hotel Outlaw’s Malcolm and Emma shared: “If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if someone looked at a relaxing word puzzle and thought, “This needs more existential pressure,” then… well… that’s basically how we got here.

“Built by the two of us at Hotel Outlaw in Swansea, Wales, Character Limit somehow grew from a small idea into something that won Third Place in the DreamHack Birmingham 2026 Indie Playground People’s Choice Award. We’re still not entirely sure how that happened, but we’re incredibly grateful.

“Over the past year we’ve obsessed over letter frequencies, argued about dictionaries, debated whether countdown timers are fair, and generally discovered that making a word game is far stranger and harder than we’d ever imagined. Especially for our first release.”

Launch features include:

• 12 Letters. No Mercy. A constant stream of tiles testing your reflexes, focus, and vocabulary.
• Multiple Game Modes: Endless, Empty the Bag, and extra challenges. Each a unique time attack survival puzzle with its own flavour of stress.
• Daily Play: One round for everyone, one chance to be the best in the world.
• Assists: Clear vowels, shift the rack, or throw in a wildcard to save yourself.
• Clean and Tactile: No clutter, no filler. Just crisp visuals, punchy feedback, and satisfying flow.
• Built for Keyboard, Mouse, or Touchscreen: Type, click, or if you’re fancy, touch your way to survival.
• Steam Achievements and Leaderboards for the main game modes.
• Welsh Language Mode: Because, according to its makers, “developing an English language word game was too easy”.
• Future plans include adding more challenge modes and expanding the language roster even more.

We asked the makers of Character Limit what led them to bring out their own game.

Malcom shared: “Both Emma and I have an interest in gaming, and in game development, and figured that we could launch a game studio in Swansea as a project. A lot of game development happens in Cardiff and east of Swansea in general, and Pembrokeshire also has firms, but Swansea oddly doesn’t. Cue the creation of Hotel Outlaw as the studio.”

Emma is on a Masters course for game development at Falmouth University, which led Malcolm to thinking that the time had come to get serious about learning game development to help her.

He said: “The best way to learn is to make something, and since I had been thinking about word games for a while, it became the learning project.

“However, as the development rolled on, it became too big to be a throwaway learning project. We couldn’t live with ourselves if it didn’t get completed, so we stuck with it.

“Character Limit was based around games where letters are picked, because everyone inevitabily tries to make up words with what they have, even as they’re picking them. The idea was extended and became what it is today.”

Making the game available in Welsh was an important factor for the duo, with Malcolm sharing: “Originally, the game was made in English, but one late night, I wondered if I could use the Welsh alphabet as an extra challenge. That led to me wondering if there were any Welsh word lists available, and then an email to Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, who very graciously helped out.

“Adding Welsh fully to the game made sense in a few ways. First, there’s the practicalities of making a game multilingual, and the work needed to add Welsh means other languages can be added in the future. While we do plan additions like French and German at some point, the work on Welsh enables us to do just that.

“There’s also the fact that Welsh is not massively supported in gaming. Its folklore, locations, and language do appear often, but not often as part of the gameplay itself.

“For example, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’s Swansea connection, or the names of characters in the Dark Souls series. Many similar references are cataloged at https://walesingames.com/

“There are games that do support Welsh in the interface, but you’d be hard pressed to find a word game that uses a Welsh dictionary in this way. With gaming being such a massive industry and a powerful medium for storytelling, Welsh does deserve a place in that digital landscape.

“We just hope that our contribution helps nudge Welsh’s use more throughout the gaming world.”

Character Limit is available now on Steam for US$7.99, with an introductory 20% launch discount available for a limited time. Find out more here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4121620/Character_Limit/

Versions for iOS and iPadOS are due for release in August.

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