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As I have a Netflix subscription, I get access to a number of games on iOS as a bonus. Most of them are shovelware nonsense. Some are tie-ins with Netflix shows like Squid Game or Queen’s Gambit. Some, are “indie hits” like Kentucky Route Zero. Some fit into more than one of these categories.

Word Trails is probably shovelware. It’s one of $hlmun games which litter the App Store that are effectively identical, and when you see the screenshots you’ll realise you’ve seen a hundred variants of it already, often as an advert in some other shovelware game. So I played it almost daily for two whole years and finally completed it. All 6070 levels.

Some people have asked me, “deKay. You’re a man with an extensive knowledge of games and you know what is good and what is bad in the gaming sphere. You have played many strange and unusual games, often eschewing the popular and mainstream for the niche and unusual. With that in mind, why the hell are you playing some ostensibly IAP-based, albeit with the IAPs removed for Netflix, tosh like this when you yourself frequently say telephone games are not games and don’t deserve your time or eyeballs?”. And to those people I say “Because it’s there”.

Now, readers of my diary will remember when I played many hundreds of levels of a dreadful iOS based, Doctor Who themed hidden object game which falls into a similar category as this and you may wonder why I’d put myself through something like that again. Word Trails at least requires a little bit of intelligence to play, even if it’s just as dull, but it’s just a Boring Boggle Clone.

The idea is to make words using the letters in the “wheel” at the bottom of the screen. Find all the words to fit in the puzzle, and you move on to the next level. That’s it – the whole game. 6070 times. You can, if you like, do a bonus puzzle each day where you do the same thing but have to try and do the words in a specific order. Manage that, and you get points which eventually unlock pictures of and related text about animals or mountains or something. Worst way to use an Encyclopaedia Britannica ever. Sometimes, in the main puzzles, you unlock gold squares or jigsaw pieces which eventually complete some other puzzle or list of items at, say, a beach, but there’s literally no reason to do this. You get some (in-game) currency, which is totally unnecessary because they’ve ripped all the IAPs out.

Quickly, I found that although the “longest word” was rarely the same (although sometimes I did get the same two or three puzzles repeated in a row), the same combinations of letters came up very frequently. For example, if AEMT are in the list, I could immediately tick off MATE, TEAM, TAME, MEAT. When you’ve done this 3035 times out of 6070, the already very samey game becomes even more samey. The game will add “allowed” words that aren’t on the board to a bonus pot for more currency when it fills up.

To make things wonderfully inconsistent and stupid, sometimes there’s a word you’ve never heard of which turns out to be an archaic legal term. Sometimes you can use both the UK and US spellings of words (like COLOR and COLOUR), sometimes you can’t (like it allows MOULD but not MOLD). Sometimes it seems to allow a word but then in a different puzzle it won’t. And, for some reason, it won’t ever allow the word ROTA, but will allow ROTAS. Actually, plurals themselves are irritatingly facile and when I found the long seven letter word is just one of the six letter words with an S on the end a little piece of me died each time.

Oh, and some rude words it allows, but only as bonus words, not as words on the actual puzzle. Some, it won’t allow at all. There also seem to be an unexpected number of religious words – mainly Christian, relating to church objects or processes – that are allowed, but although BIBLE is possible, neither KORAN or QURAN is allowed. Hmm.

So, should you play this game? Absolutely not. But, it did kill some time for a few minutes in my day. For TWO YEARS.