Thank you Lightwood Games for sending us this game to review!

With its dual screen layout the 3DS is ideal for word find puzzles.  Lightwood Games has released several word search type games for Nintendo and mobile platforms.  Epic Word Search Holiday Special is the third in the series and features five massive puzzles with roughly fifteen-hundred words hidden within fourteen thousand characters.

There are five themed puzzles and only two of them are holiday related.  Besides the Halloween and Christmas puzzles there are others based on love, summer and monsters in general.  While the monster themed puzzle has all of the horror movie monsters covered, I was pleasantly surprised to see ones included from Pokemon and Dr. Who.  Since those are trademarked names they’re referred to as “Catch them all” and “Doctor ?”.   

Each of the puzzles has several related puzzles combined into one.  Each section has color coded letters and sometimes the words will span across multiple sections.  Because the puzzles are so huge, you’ll have to use the circle pad to navigate and gain access to different sections.  The words to find will appear on the top screen and will change as you scroll across different sections of the puzzle.   

Words to find will be frontwards, backwards, and diagonal.  Not surprisingly, the backwards and diagonal words are harder to locate. The words themselves vary in length and many of them I was not familiar with.  Selecting them is done by dragging and selecting the words using the bottom touch screen.    

Progress is saved automatically and the percentage found for each section can be sent via Street Pass if you want compete against other word search enthusiasts.  Because of the simplistic visuals, this game is quick to load and is ideal for short gaming sessions.  The background music is pleasant to listen to and consists of public domain classical music tracks.

Like most word searches, Epic Word Search Holiday Special is pretty clean and suitable for people of all ages to play.  There are Halloween and demon references in the puzzles that you would expect to find them in.  The love themed puzzle has alcohol references in having you find words like pub and brewery.  The word hookup is also in that puzzle.  On a positive note, the Christmas puzzle has many words from the traditional hymns along with the secular songs.

In the end, Epic Word Search Holiday Special is sure to entertain those who love word finds.  It’s not for everyone though.  If it wasn’t for the Pokemon puzzle my kids would have little interest in this title.   Those that do get into the game will sink several hours into it so for them it’s a pretty good bargain.  For everyone else, stick with the $0.99 paperback books.