Dane Cook and Robert Bowling Announce Vicious Vocab, a Genre-Bending Word Game With a Big Twist

Ex-Call of Duty creative strategist Robert Bowling and comedian Dane Cook have revealed a brand new, genre-bending video game known as Vicious Vocab, exclusively to IGN.Vicious Vocab is a genre-bending spin on casual word games like Scrabble, Words With Friends, and Wordle, with a big twist. While Bowling and Cook are careful not to share much about the twist to preserve some surprises, the game goes well beyond mixing and matching letters to make new words. The words have power and meaning… and they can dramatically change not only what happens to you, but the entire genre of game that you’re playing. Check out the trailer below to get an idea of the unexpected shift that happens in Vicious Vocab.Made by a team of five people who collectively call themselves “funcool games,” Vicious Vocab is described as “Scrabble meets Balatro in a backroom casino.” On its own, it’s a fun twist on the word game genre. There’s an action element, which has led the team to referring to the game as a “word brawler” or, in Cook’s words, a first-person speller. You can “take damage” based on certain words. You can then counter it with another word, so long as you have the right letters. For instance, as seen in the trailer, if you spell out “torch” or “fire,” you might take fire damage. You can then spell out “water” or “ice” and extinguish the flame to stop yourself from taking more damage. These effects add interesting layers to the expected mechanics of a word game.“That's something you don't get in normal word games,” said Bowling when speaking with IGN. “Building systems that work against systems that work against other systems. When you're four layers deep in a combo, that is the stuff that really makes you feel like, 'Am I playing a word game anymore?' I know I'm making words, I know I'm using letters, but the sort of chaining of events you can get yourself into really sort of that's when you start breaking out of one genre and start making something new.”Vicious Vocab (Provided by funcool games)However, as the trailer reveals, Vicious Vocab can shift in an incredibly unexpected direction, taking it from a cozy game your mom might play casually on the couch to something in line with The Stanley Parable. If you play the right words, you can move away from the word board and have an entirely new experience that you would've never anticipated."We both want to create holy s**t moments," said Cook. "We want to create memorable moments."Although there are plans to add multiplayer to the game at some point, it is a single-player narrative driven game. If you want to, you can just stick to the more traditional word game and play that “infinitely,” but the game also expands in a whole other direction beyond that.“We're building out a very deep single player experience that has over 20 different narrative endings, lots of achievements, but the plan is to also expand into a multiplayer experience,” said Bowling. “So there is going to be both. They go in very different directions though, where the multiplayer experience is all about replayability and the single player experience is all about a lot of endings, still a lot of replayability. You can still play it infinitely, but there's a lot more narrative to it that may or may not be in the multiplayer side of it. Think about it as a stem that breaks off into two directions and they get equally weird, but in different ways.”The pairing of an ex-Call of Duty developer and a comedian is one that may seem unlikely, but it actually dates back 20 years. The two met when Bowling was starting out as a community manager at Infinity Ward and somehow, this led to them playing Call of Duty 2 together. During a match of Capture the Flag, Bowling was impressed that Cook was actually a valuable asset who played the objective instead of mindlessly running around trying to farm kills. From there, a friendship was formed, which eventually led to Cook lending his voice to the “battle chatter” (voice lines for characters yelling out commands and call outs in-game) in the Modern Warfare games.The Best Call of Duty Multiplayer GamesOver the years, Cook would drum up cool ideas for a game to pitch to Bowling, but it wasn’t until about a year ago when one of those seeds actually began to materialize into a full-fledged game. The initial idea was simple: a word game where your words have an effect. If you write "bomb," it might blow up the other words on the board. It was cute and novel, but as the small team began to brainstorm ideas for effects, it eventually took them into new unexpected directions, such as moving away from the word board.If this were any other game, developers might say this is a bad idea, because it can lead to a spiral of new mechanics and concepts, but funcool games felt that this exploration that knocks down boundaries and defined genre identities was exciting and worth pursuing.“It's like, ‘No, I want the game to be wherever it takes us and then see how far can we go,’" said Bowling. “Because you do have some natural constraints from a design standpoint. It's not [like you can] literally do anything because this is all bespoke, handcrafted stuff. So then the question became like, ‘Oh my God, how far can you go with just seven letters and your vocabulary?’ That became the sort of development mantra of, ‘Where is the end?’ And I'll be honest with you, we haven't found it yet. You can get yourself in a lot of weird scenarios with just seven letters, and that has been the most fun. Honestly, when we first started talking about this idea, I loved it as a nugget of the ideal, enough to be like, ‘All right, let's dig into it.’ But I didn't yet know how deep you could go with it.Vicious Vocab (Provided by funcool games)“Once I cracked that nut creatively, I was like, ‘I love this. I need to play this and I want it to get extremely weird. Dane has a better vocabulary than me. I always go back to weird. I think Stanley Parable. I think give me something where I'm like, ‘What the hell is happening?’"For Cook, this is sort of a culmination of his career. When he was a kid, his dad would read the dictionary to have a better vocabulary for his job, as he was a color commentator for local hockey games. Cook thought this was “lame” when he was young, but grew to have a better understanding of that process once he became a comic. His entire job as a stand up comic is about using carefully calculated vocabulary to have the best effect on the audience.“I later found myself saying to him, ‘I paint verbal pictures, and if I repeat the same word over and over, it's blurring the audible version, the audio version, and yet if I have different vernacular for ways to describe something, you're always giving it musicality,’” said Cook. “So lo and behold, I used to have screensavers, word of the day, and things that I could then implement into my standup that I thought helped the musicality paint the verbal pictures.Vicious Vocab (Provided by funcool games)“I love language, and it's something that to this day when you come down and see me do a show, you'll go, ‘Oh wait, I saw that you used ‘malleable’ to describe blah, blah, blah, blah." I say, "Yeah, because I think it danced better than just saying ‘bent.’ So, [words are] very much a part of my identity and how I like to impact. And again, as a fan of games like this, growing up, playing Scrabble, these are the games that I've always appreciated and enjoyed. So, to feel like I might be able to take it to a new place that also maybe even expands on what those games have been, I hope we pull it off, because I'm really excited at the possibilities.”In addition to Vicious Vocab, Robert Bowling is also working on a new, larger-scale FPS game from a new studio known as //18.bravo. The game will feature a single-player story and a PvP multiplayer mode, but the game is actively pushing back on live-service trends. Dane Cook also has a new documentary titled Funny Money available on Netflix today.Vicious Vocab will release on PC at an undisclosed date in the not-too-distant future. No pricing plan has been decided yet.Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.