Spin to Win: 3D Crossword Game ‘Wordomi’ Launches Out of Early Access Today

While word games have a long history with puzzle fans, they haven’t fundamentally changed much over the decades. Crossword puzzles, for instance, are available every week in the most-read newspapers in the world, engaging millions of readers. But despite breaking free of the confines of print and entering the digital age, the answers can still only go down or across.

Wordomi takes the structure of crossword puzzles, as well as newer games like Wordle, and adds a twist: the ability to literally flip, turn, and twist the puzzle in three dimensions. The mixed reality game puts its puzzles in the room with you, while hand-tracking technology lets you grab and manipulate them so you can build words that extend downward, sideways, and front to back.

Although Wordomi isn’t exactly a crossword game in the traditional sense, it shares some similarities with familiar word puzzles—while pushing out in its own new direction. In the game’s Classic mode, the idea is to find a word hidden in scrambled letters. But Wordomi gives the puzzle a tactile aspect, as you can pick up each letter with your hands and place them in the word where they belong.

The puzzles get more complex over time: You might have more letters than you need, and after solving one word, another might grow out from one of the letters, running in a different direction. What makes Wordomi feel unique is the way you can grab the puzzle and move it around in mixed reality. You can position it how you like and see how the words connect, or use the Physics mode to place the puzzle on a table or your floor for a comfortable physical-world interface.

In Classic mode, the idea is to try to solve each puzzle within a certain amount of time and with as few mistakes as possible—guess the wrong word too many times, and you’ll have to restart the level. You can also check clues for the words that give you their definitions, with another element of the challenge daring you to avoid them. But even if you repeat a level, it won’t get any easier on you because Wordomi chooses new words to challenge you with instead of repeating the same ones over and over.

Wordomi first launched in Early Access in February 2024, and since then, it’s grown quite a bit, with developer Field of Vision adding new modes and taking in feedback from the community. Each of the four modes challenges players in different ways. In one, words get longer and more complex over time. The other modes have you forming multiple words from the same letters, or guessing words in keeping with a particular theme, like “Pirates.”

To celebrate Wordomi’s full release, we sat down with Field of Vision Founder Arnaud Baernhoft to discuss the game’s inspiration, its journey through Early Access, and where it might go in the future.

Arnaud Baernhoft:Wordomi’s core idea actually came from a silly holiday game I made called Santa’s Conveyor Chaos. In it, presents would pour into your living room in mixed reality, and you had to grab them and toss them into Santa’s sack. But the twist? Some had hidden letters underneath. If you held onto the right ones and spelled a festive word, you could win a free game key. That mechanic of grabbing, rotating, and discovering letters was so satisfying, it stuck with me. Wordomi grew from that moment.

And I really love puzzles and making games that feel good in your hands. Wordomi started as an experiment in combining that physicality with something more cerebral. I wanted to see if a word game could be as fun to touch and move through as it is to solve.

AB: I’ve had a lot of inspiration from playing other amazing puzzle games on the Meta Horizon Store that implement hand tracking so well, so I can thank those who came before me. We all learn from each other, and what I realized early on is that the precision of how you grab, move, and rotate pieces of a puzzle is one of the most important aspects, maybe even more than the puzzle itself! It needs to feel satisfying, otherwise where’s the joy in using MR in the first place?

Hand tracking just makes sense for a word game. Instead of clicking or typing, you’re literally grabbing and slotting in the words. It makes the puzzle feel physical, like building with blocks, which adds a lot of charm and immersion.

AB: Getting hand tracking to feel natural is tough—there’s no haptic feedback, and everyone moves differently. Making sure the interaction felt intuitive and familiar was a huge focus. And doing it solo meant balancing puzzle design, user interface, and tech all at once.

AB: I created a VR puzzle game called Pipe Dream Co. many years ago. It’s a classic water pipe puzzle game, but in three dimensions, of course. That was really my first dive into creating complex puzzles, and what I learned there was that, relative to the game development itself, puzzle level design is extremely complex.

You have to rethink how to guide players subtly and make sure solutions feel earned, not random or frustrating. And progress needs to make sense—how do you quantify difficulty in puzzles? There are easy metrics, like number of pieces and time to accomplish. But with just these, any puzzle game gets old pretty fast. There’s a unique art to puzzle design where you need to try and keep the player in that “I’m-so-close-to-figuring-this-out” feeling throughout all levels, no matter how easy or hard.

AB: Early Access lets me test the core idea in the real world. I learned what types of puzzles people liked, how they interacted with those puzzles, and what actually felt fun versus just clever. That feedback was priceless and helped develop Wordomi into the game it is now.

AB: Wow, I’ll see if I can keep this short!

The game started with a simple idea: How can I get a 3D crossword look and feel, mixed with the word mechanics of a game like Wordle? This thought became the first game mode: “Classic.” So it started small with this one game mode that procedurally generates levels of increasing difficulty, using various variables, such as number of words to guess and the length of those words.

I added a “Zen” system pretty fast once I realized there are quite a few players who just want to take their time—no lives or time limit to solve the puzzles. And it has its own save, so it doesn’t progress the non-Zen side of the game.

Once I realized this was successful—how to quantify success? Simple: It’s fun to play!—I started working on new game modes. First came “Theme,” which is the same as Classic, but with the words falling within a certain theme, like pirates, food, or sports. Then after that came a really unexpected but awesome game mode: “Subgram.” Each level of this game mode has a set of letters with which you need to spell as many words as you can. The words keep branching out of the previous words you spelled, so the complexity comes in that other than the first word of the level, you’ll always need to use one of the letters as a starting point for the next word.

I then implemented a cool overall feature, which is a physics system. So when you start the game, you’re given the option to play in “Snap” or “Physics.” Snap keeps your letters on a grid as you play, which is the original system. Physics doesn’t have that, so the letters you’re given are just laying on a surface like your table or floor.

Eventually, I added a fourth game mode: “Word Of The Day.” It wouldn’t be a proper word puzzle game if there wasn’t a word of the day! This one is usually a pretty long word, so it can be quite hard. But that’s the point, really—it’s only once a day, after all.

AB: It’s been great. Players pointed out things I’d never catch on my own, like where gestures didn’t register well, or which mechanics felt confusing. Their input helped shape the experience, and it made development feel less isolated.

As a developer, it’s so easy to work in a vacuum. You keep playing your game over and over, and it just becomes second nature. And then something that is now so intuitive for you is the opposite for new players. Getting some early testers to try out the experience and give feedback on how it felt for them personally is one of the most valuable aspects of game development. Wordomi would not be where it is today without the community and those who believed in it during early development.

AB: Yep! The full release brings some overall polish, and I have plans for new levels, game modes, and languages, and maybe even multiplayer word challenges if there’s demand. I have so many cool ideas that I’m keen to explore with the community and integrate into Wordomi.

AB: Just that I hope people give Wordomi a try, even if they don’t usually play word games. It’s not about being a walking dictionary: It’s about playing with words in a tactile, playful way. You’re physically picking up letters, slotting them in, twisting them around in space. It’s designed to feel calm and satisfying, whether you’re a crossword lover or someone who just wants to unwind in mixed reality for a few minutes. There’s something really relaxing about solving puzzles with your hands.

You can start testing your word-descrambling skills in 3D with Wordomi today—it’s available now on the Meta Horizon Store for $9.99 USD.