Devs behind GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and TimeSplitters are done with big shooters after getting burned by Embracer, so their next game is a Balatro-like twist on Scrabble—and you can try the demo now

When you read the words “From legendary developers Steve Ellis and David Doak” you could be forgiven for assuming that the next words would be “comes a new FPS”.

Ellis and Doak were among Free Radical Design’s co-founders, giving us the excellent TimeSplitters series, and nearly Star Wars: Battlefront 3, before it was canned and the studio went bankrupt. Before that, they worked at Rare, on games like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.

But their new game, which you can play now thanks to Steam Next Fest, has nothing to do with any of these illustrious first-person shooters. Instead, Beyond Words is a roguelike take on Scrabble, which sounds quite a bit like Balatro.

This might seem like a weird departure for them, but after their recent experience trying to get an FPS off the ground, it’s actually pretty understandable.

In 2021, Free Radical was reformed. It had survived bankruptcy and been acquired by Crytek in 2009, where it was renamed Crytek UK, and then in 2014 it was sold to Deep Silver. The reformed Free Radical continued to be a subsidiary of Deep Silver under Embracer Group, and former members of the team, including Ellis and Doak, returned, specifically to bring back TimeSplitters.

But since Embracer’s whole strategy appears to be acquiring old studios and old games, before shutting them down, things didn’t exactly work out. Embracer shut down Free Radical in 2023.

Chatting to Time Extension in December last year, Ellis called the experience “soul-crushing” after he had to “lay off the entire staff”. And he wasn’t eager to go through that again.

“Having been through this twice, I was keen not to jump right into another big team environment. I was also keen to get more hands-on than it was possible to be while running a larger studio, so doing something smaller sounded like fun.”

Doak feels the same way: “My best experiences of making games have been working in (relatively) small teams. So that’s what we decided to do. I’m too old for all the other shit now.”

So they joined forces again to make a much smaller game and developed a few prototypes. Beyond Words was not one of those prototypes, though; it was a fun weekend project for Ellis while the team was working on another project, which ended up convincing everyone to change course

“I enjoy the scope for strategic play,” said Ellis. “In other roguelike games that I’ve played, I find that although they are heavily RNG-driven, the random factors quickly push you to adopt a particular strategy or fail, and your real choices actually diminish as you play for longer.

“With Beyond Words, the board plays a huge role—you’re constantly interacting with the words you’ve already played, planning for future moves and finding new strategies as your run evolves. It feels more open and flexible.”

Even if Beyond Words is a success, don’t expect their studio, MindFuel Games, to pivot to another big FPS.

“Never say never,” said Ellis, “but a return to big shooters is probably unlikely. Shooters require big money. Big money requires external funding. External funding, in my experience, too often leads to random closures. I’m not keen to get back into a situation where I’m asked to build a team, but I can’t offer them job security.”

Keep an eye out for our Beyond Words impressions later this week. And if you’ve got a hankering for more word-based roguelikes, we got contributor Abbie Stone to dig through all of them last year to see if any of them could hold a candle to Balatro.

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