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The same is true of music and cinema,” he adds. “It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you’ve got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch.

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With these types of companies—meaning companies who deal extensively in creative product—much of a company’s value is based upon the intellectual property in hand, so they need to do everything they can to secure and protect those assets,” says Michael Lovitz, a Beverly Hills intellectual property attorney specializing in the comic book, gaming, and graphic-novel industries. “However, the concept of a creator retaining certain moral rights to their work is a very European perspective. That’s why they have a droit moral (moral rights) segment of the copyright law that grants the creator certain moral rights to their work with respect to artistic integrity and reputation, to not have things done to or with their work that they don’t want done. In Europe, even if you transfer all of your IP rights, you cannot transfer your moral rights. That is not something that is well-known or widely recognized in the U.S., and in fact was excluded from the revised U.S. Copyright Law, and thus does not have quite the same weight in the U.S. that it seems to have with European creators.

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With UnWord, each game is one minute long, designed for casual play. The limited-time mechanic is a common motivator in puzzle games, but here, one minute prohibits players from fully taking advantage of the puzzle. With so many letters and so many combinations, the minute limit means never being able to use every combination, so no obsessively perfect scores, and no chance to even type all the words you can find. Instead of an exciting motivator, the time limit made the goals feel impossible.

The press release that originally intrigued me to download, play, and review this game referred to “thousands of word combinations”, and I couldn’t help feeling like the one-minute time limit directly blocks players from accessing those combinations. I kept looking around for casual mode, or hoping to unlock bonus time, or untimed levels, but instead I kept feeling like I was missing puzzles, like I was prohibited from accessing a game I’d have wanted to play. UnWord felt like a solid prototype or beta, with one mechanic in desperate need of work.