I quite enjoyed Word Play, the word-making Balatro-like from Game Maker's Toolkit. There are lots of good and interesting perks, and the core gameplay look of making words under constraints and picking between two things is wonderful.
However, I've been trying to complete Ultramarathon mode for quite a while now, and it is not going well.
At this point, I'm fairly certain that the only way to actually beat it is to get the right combination of modifiers to set up an engine that breaks the fundamental economies. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of these engines, and whether you'll get any pieces of them is entirely luck dependent. Worse, you won't know until late in the game whether it's going to be a win or if it was hopeless the whole time due to modifier RNG. So you play perfectly for 20-30 minutes, maybe as much as an hour, and then you lose through not fault of your place.
It is, for my money, the worst kind of unfun difficulty in games. Yes, you need to be good enough to get as far as you can, which lets you see as many different modifiers as possible in as few plays as possible. But often that's just not enough: there was no possible way to win the run, because the right modifiers didn't show up. The scaling in the later rounds is so insanely high that you can only win through breaking the game, and perfect play will still lose the vast majority of the time.
I probably would have tapped out if I wasn't playing the game with my wife. Her ability to grind things out is enviable, so long as they're not platformers or timing based.
(I've found two videos on Youtube of winning Ultramarathon runs of this game, and both used the kinds of degenerate strategies I think are necessary, the ones that are really heavily luck-based. It's possible that I'm wrong, and being really good at the game can get you there, but I actually don't think that's true, I do think you need to have one of the rare engines set up.)
Side note: I think I would care less if the select screen didn't look like it was taunting me about not finishing Ultramarathon.
