LOK is an absurdist puzzle game for the present moment

Absurdity is dead. Long live absurdity.

Oh, hey, sorry. Been playing a lot of LOK Digital and reading the news. Both things live on my phone, so it’s easy to hop between them. Read a distressing headline? Boot up LOK and spell out LOLO. You’ll feel better. Well, no, you won’t 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!

The absurdity of LOK Digital starts with its name. For one, I don’t think we need the “Digital” part. I understand that it’s based on a puzzle book originally created by Blaž Urban Gracar​, who teamed up with Icedrop Games to create the video game version of the book, but to be honest, I think we could’ve just called it LOK and folks would’ve known it was digital. Perhaps LOK Physical has more of an international following than I know, and if so, please don’t 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. Have pity.

LOK 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 “LOK.” You can spell it in either direction (i.e., “KOL” 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’s only a rule you get to later, once you’ve fully adopted the abstruse logic inherent to this game. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Once you spell LOK, you can then remove one single tile from the board, eliminating a “B” in a row that reads “LBOK,” thus allowing you to spell, once more, LOK.

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 “TLAK,” which, once spelled, lets you eliminate two tiles in a row. Then we get “TA,” which lets you eliminate all tiles of a single letter. Then we learn that X is a “conductor,” which means you can pass over it, like with “LxOK,” and it’ll still give you LOK. Then there’s “BE,” 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.

LOK is to word search games what Balatro is to poker. Sure, a baseline of familiarity in the thing that is being riffed upon will get you going at the outset, but ultimately, the logic that governs each takes on a life of its own. By the time you finish the single-player campaign of LOK, you will be muttering to yourself things like:

• I just have to LOLO into a TA, and then that will let me TLAK.
• BE lets me have an X, which creates a pathway to LOK, so that I can eliminate J, leaving only Xes, which can be systematically eliminated by TA.
• TA! TA! TA! Ha!
• How do question marks work?

Fans of complexity will find it here, but so too will fans of hints, as each stage lets you see the series of words you’ll need to complete it, if you so choose. I took this option on some of the later stages, as they can become overwhelming, and — as you probably inferred from the opening grafs of this piece — I’m feeling a bit on edge as of late. Plus, and perhaps more importantly, who cares if you use hints to finish a game? The Constitution might no longer be in effect! TA!

LOK probably didn’t intend to be read in the context in which I am reading it, and yet what other choice do we have? Such is the nature of art and the progression of history. For me, trapped in the amber of 2025, it is an absurdist puzzle game for the present moment, living on my phone and thus jutting up against some of the most depressingly chaotic shit I’ve read in years. For you, perhaps, it will just be a silly puzzle game that you could, if you wanted, play as a PDF. (It is also on Steam.) But I do encourage you to pick it up on your phone, where I think it most shines as an object of absurdity amid the absurd logic we are all now living under. Make it a part of your daily parade of confusions. LOK in, as it were.

Speaking of, there’s a daily mode to play after you learn all the game’s rules. You can choose to play it from the get-go, but you’re not gonna know all the words, so it’s kind of pointless to do so. But once you do know all the words, like me, you can boot up LOK Digital and play it after you read the headlines. You can see the ways in which the ultrawealthy are claiming our very country as a playground for their whims, and then you can spell LOLO, which lets you eliminate all letters in a diagonal line. Neither makes much sense, but at least LOK has the decency to be fun.

LOK Digital was released Dec. 11, 2024, on Mac and Windows PC, and Jan. 23, 2025, on Android and iOS. It was tested on iOS using a copy of the game purchased by the author. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.