{"id":1122616,"date":"2026-02-01T11:35:42","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T11:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.polygon.com\/?p=521969"},"modified":"2026-02-01T11:35:42","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T11:35:42","slug":"lok-is-an-absurdist-puzzle-game-for-the-present-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/lok-is-an-absurdist-puzzle-game-for-the-present-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"LOK is an absurdist puzzle game for the present moment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Absurdity is dead. Long live absurdity.<\/p>\n

Oh, hey, sorry. Been playing a lot of LOK Digital<\/em> and reading the news. Both things live on my phone, so it\u2019s easy to hop between them. Read a distressing headline? Boot up LOK<\/em> and spell out LOLO. You\u2019ll feel better. Well, no, you won\u2019t feel better. But you will feel bewildered in a different way. Read about how the Treasury Department has been taken over by an unelected individual and his weird army of goons? Stop that! Spell out nonsense words. Seek patterns in absurdity. Who cares! Make it all make sense. TLAK!<\/p>\n

The absurdity of LOK Digital<\/em> starts with its name. For one, I don\u2019t think we need the \u201cDigital\u201d part. I understand that it\u2019s based on a puzzle book originally created by Bla\u017e Urban Gracar\u200b, who teamed up with Icedrop Games to create the video game version of the book, but to be honest, I think we could\u2019ve just called it LOK<\/em> and folks would\u2019ve known it was digital. Perhaps LOK Physical <\/em>has more of an international following than I know, and if so, please don\u2019t blame me, as I live in the United States, where our information ecosystems are collapsing. I can barely load a government website after 5 p.m. on a Friday<\/a>. Have pity.<\/p>\n

LOK<\/em> is like a word search puzzle, but the words are absurd and the rules are absurd. Your goal, on a basic level, is to draw a line through a series of letters to spell out farcical words. The very first one you learn is the eponymous \u201cLOK.\u201d You can spell it in either direction (i.e., \u201cKOL\u201d is acceptable), so long as you get all three letters in a row with no additional letters in between. Unless, that is, one of those additional letters is an X, but that\u2019s only a rule you get to later, once you\u2019ve fully adopted the abstruse logic inherent to this game. But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. Once you spell LOK, you can then remove one single tile from the board, eliminating a \u201cB\u201d in a row that reads \u201cLBOK,\u201d thus allowing you to spell, once more, LOK.<\/p>\n

As in most puzzle games of this ilk, the rules grow ever more byzantine with each sequential puzzle. Next up in our kit of silly words is \u201cTLAK,\u201d which, once spelled, lets you eliminate two tiles in a row. Then we get \u201cTA,\u201d which lets you eliminate all tiles of a single letter. Then we learn that X is a \u201cconductor,\u201d which means you can pass over it, like with \u201cLxOK,\u201d and it\u2019ll still give you LOK. Then there\u2019s \u201cBE,\u201d which has the privilege or curse of being a recognizable word in English, whose power is not in eliminating letters but in making blank tiles into a letter of your choosing. And on.<\/p>\n

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