Hi, Cadence here. I'm here to kick off an exciting newsletter for our upcoming game, Pronoun Palace! We're hoping to share some interesting insight about our game every couple weeks up until the game's release.
Let's start off by talking about one of the most important parts of Pronoun Palace, spells! Spells are activated abilities you can use to modify tiles, and you can have up to four of them at a time.
The most basic spell—and the one that the Lexicographer starts with—is Letter Opener, which is simply used to remove tiles from the board. This can be an effective means of dealing with problematic letters you can't find a good use for, and it can also allow you to access queued letters in the preview row above your tiles.
One of the most versatile spells is Shift Cipher, which allows you to change a letter to the one before or after it in the alphabet (depending on which side of the tile you click). So A can become B or Z, and then B can become C, or Z can become Y, etc. It's a great tool in pretty much any battle, and just one of a few spells like it.
Spells—and the preview row—might look familiar if you've ever played Edmund McMillen's The Legend of Bumbo. While flawed, the game had some strong ideas that have been largely overlooked by others working with the genre; Talia Mair cited Bumbo's color-coded mana system as one of the primary mechanical inspirations behind Brutal Orchestra, and to great effect.
On the topic of mana, you might have noticed those small white tiles on the edges of spells. These tiles represent the charge of a spell, i.e. how many remaining uses it has and the letter it gets charged by. Using letters in words will charge spells with those corresponding letters. So for example, if you submit the word "rebate," then all spells with a charge of E will regain two charges.
Different spells can be charged by different letters, and stronger spells tend to have less common ones. Cigarette lets you convert a tile into a wildcard, but Candy Cigarette converts a tile into a candy wildcard that heals you—at the cost of having a worse charge. Of course, nothing is stopping you from using a wildcard as a specific letter to charge a spell.
There's still plenty of interesting spells we haven't touched on, but you'll get to see them soon enough once the game is finished!