Apple / games / SPOT THE WORDS
REVIEW
Spot The Words is a quiet word search that doesn't beg for your money.
F Permadi's indie puzzler ships every category for free, scrambles words in any direction, and never once asks you to watch a video for a hint.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Most word-search games on the App Store are advertising businesses with a puzzle attached. Spot The Words isn’t. F Permadi — a solo developer who has been shipping small iOS games since the early App Store years — built a word search that scrambles letters in every direction, themes each grid around a category, and then quietly refuses to monetise any of it.
The result is the kind of app that doesn’t trend, doesn’t update its screenshots every season, and doesn’t show up in best-of lists. It also doesn’t interrupt you mid-level to sell you coins. Nearly a decade after launch, that’s still a sharper editorial statement than most casual games manage.
It's the rare casual puzzle that ships every category for free and trusts you to stop playing when you're done.
FEATURES
The premise is a word search with two twists. First, every grid is themed — over 100 word-categories, from countries to fruits to common verbs, and each contains a stack of levels at varying board sizes. Second, words can run in any direction, including diagonally and back on themselves, so the eye can't just sweep rows looking for straight lines.
Swipe across the tiles you think form a word. Get it right and the tiles vanish; clear the board and the level advances. If you stall, a Hint reveals the first few letters of one word. There are several tile themes to pick from, a basic difficulty curve as boards grow, and no level gating — every category and every level is open from the first launch.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pricing is the whole story. There is no In-App Purchase, no rewarded-video unlock, no premium category pack, no energy meter, no streak shaming. Free means free. That alone separates Spot The Words from roughly every other word puzzle on the App Store top charts, where the actual game is usually wedged between two ad slots and a paywall.
The mechanics are honest too. The any-direction rule makes a familiar genre slightly less brain-dead, and the trivia framing — guessing what category-appropriate words might be hiding before you find them — gives the better levels a small thinking-puzzle layer the genre usually skips.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Visually it looks its age. The 2016 launch screens are still the current screens, the tile chrome is functional rather than designed, and there's no haptics, no Dynamic Type support, and no iPad-specific layout — the tablet build is a stretched phone. Sound is sparse, and the level-complete animation is the same one it shipped with.
There's also no progress sync, no Game Center leaderboards, no daily puzzle, and no statistics screen — you can't see how many categories you've cleared without scrolling and counting. For anyone used to NYT Connections or Wordle's once-a-day ritual, Spot The Words has no event layer to pull you back tomorrow.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you want a word search you can play for ten minutes on a flight without an internet connection, an account, or a subscription pitch. Skip it if you want production polish or a daily hook. F Permadi has kept this app quietly maintained for nearly a decade, and the next thing worth adding would be a single daily board — that would turn a perfectly fine pocket puzzle into something people remember to open.