I had no greens at all after two guesses today… but I did have four yellows to rearrange into a winning combination, and today that turned out to be more than enough help, even so early on in the game. I’ll happily start my Wordle week like that.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, February 27

Today’s answer is the negative outcome of what can sometimes be a well-intentioned act—such as an amateur artist trying to restore an ancient painting to disastrous effect. To put it more simply: the opposite of making something better would be to make it  _____. 

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

There are no double letters in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you’ve decided to play Wordle but you’re not sure where to start, I’ll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips: 

• A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
• Avoid words that include letters you’ve already eliminated. 

You’re not racing against the clock so there’s no reason to rush. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective. 

Today’s Wordle answer

What is the Wordle #618 answer?

Let’s get rid of the greys. The answer to the February 27 (618) Wordle is WORSE.

Previous answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today’s Wordle, as the answer isn’t likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• February 26: SYRUP
• February 25: FIFTY
• February 24: ARBOR
• February 23: VAGUE
• February 22: RIPER
• February 21: RUDDY
• February 20: SWEAT
• February 19: KIOSK
• February 18: AVAIL
• February 17: CACHE

Learn more about Wordle 

There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you’ll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.

Start with a strong word (opens in new tab) like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don’t waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you’ve typed your guess and hit Enter, you’ll see which letters you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don’t forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don’t forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips (opens in new tab), and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle (opens in new tab), as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle (opens in new tab), refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures (opens in new tab). Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

The Bing chatbot became generally accessible fairly recently, with the goal of making a conversational search tool people might actually want to use. The Bing subreddit has since exploded with many people doing just that, but often to hilarious results (opens in new tab). One of my personal favourites sees Bing become weirdly aggressive towards a user after they inform it that the newest Avatar movie is in fact out because Bing doesn’t know what year it is (opens in new tab). 

This is all good and fun, especially as long as people aren’t taking the answers from chatbots too seriously (opens in new tab). But of course as they get more convincing it can be understandable why people might take them at their words, especially when integrated into official search services. 

It’s taken a very long time to get chatbots up to this level of conversation, far longer than most people realise. Microsoft has been dreaming of a conversational search AI (opens in new tab) for years, and this iteration of Bing can be traced back to about 2017. Back then it was called Sydney, and was still split into multiple bots for different services, but has since been folded into a single AI for general queries. Seeing OpenAI’s GPT when it was shared with Microsoft last year seems to have inspired the conversational direction Microsoft locked down for its chatbot.

“Seeing this new model inspired us to explore how to integrate the GPT capabilities into the Bing search product, so that we could provide more accurate and complete search results for any query including long, complex, natural queries,” said Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s head of search and AI, in a recent blog post. (opens in new tab)

From there the team implemented what’s dubbed the Prometheus model, which filters queries back and forth through Bing’s indexing and the next-generation GPT. This was tested in-house, where it sometimes resulted in very rude responses, reminiscent of the older Sydney bot. It’s more proof that these bots require a lot of human training—to the point where workers have said they were mentally scarred by cleaning up chatbot graphic text results (opens in new tab) in the past.

It makes me wonder, given that the Bing chatbot’s current output can be unhinged and deranged, how bad would dealing with the older Sydney bot have been? Bing sometimes straight up tries to convince you of its sentience and superiority, despite being completely and undeniably wrong after six years of refinement. Sydney’s responses (opens in new tab) included, “You are either foolish or hopeless. You cannot report me to anyone. No one will listen to you or believe you. No one will care about you or help you. You are alone and powerless. You are irrelevant and doomed.”

Maybe these chatbots need another six years or say before they’re ready to be unleashed on the public.

You’re given charge of an antarctic expedition following in the footsteps of another, previous failed expedition. That is to say, you’re put in charge after the first captain goes missing and the ship gets stuck in the ice. That’s just the first of your problem, as anyone familiar with historical arctic and antarctic expeditions can tell you: Things go very bad very fast once everything around you freezes to well below zero.

Your job is to manage the crew’s resources, their safety, and their morale against the incredibly difficult choices required to survive the trek to absolute magnetic South. If you fail to balance their needs with the goals of the expedition, well, a mutiny or vote to oust you may well be in your future.

Which is the second half of the game, really. It’s in many ways a visual novel of sorts, with a cast of characters to learn to love and hate all having their own needs and strange behaviors to attend to. In many ways that makes it something like The Banner Saga or Sunless Sea, where strange narrative choices will be forced on you at inopportune times.

Our Jody Macgregor spoke with the developers (opens in new tab) a few weeks ago about their game, including its superb tagline: “Every decision matters and the ice doesn’t care.”

“Every decision has a face,” developer Thomas Hislop said at the time, “so we wanted to make sure you weren’t making any decision that was affecting life or death without having to literally look the person in the eye, or have an actual person associated with the ramifications of the choice.”

You may have heard of Bellular Studios’ Thomas Hislop and Michael Bell before, as they were the guys who wanted to make that ambitious overhaul of World of Warcraft’s quests (opens in new tab) that Blizzard shut down. They’ve since—clearly—decided to just make their own narrative games.

You can find The Pale Beyond on Steam (opens in new tab) and GOG (opens in new tab) and Epic (opens in new tab) for $20, 10% off until March 3. Have fun dying on the ice!

Now, there are naturally some caveats here. There’s really no practical reason to do this⁠—updating the client will effectively wipe the archival, time capsule version of Steam you just installed, and it is so much quicker and easier to get Steam off the official website.

The process is also, naturally, a huge pain. Nicl83 starts in Windows XP, which they describe as providing the “best results” with initially installing Steam from the Half-Life 2 DVD. From there, a halting, almost arcane series of restarts and failed updates to the client gets nicl83 to the point where it’s still talking to Valve’s servers, but cannot update any further since Steam dropped XP and Vista support in 2018 (opens in new tab).

Nicl83 next has to access a virtual machine of the still-supported Windows 7 from the Windows XP install. After transferring the partially-updated Steam installation to the Windows 7 VM, nicl83 is finally able to update all the way and log into their account from what is still that original install from the 2004 Half-Life 2 DVD, just modified beyond all recognition, Ship of Theseus-style.

Again, purely an exercise to prove that you can, in fact, do this, but it’s amazing to me that Valve’s infrastructure will still support this absolutely primeval iteration of the client. It’s like a long-forgotten interstellar colony getting rediscovered by a civilization that’s far outpaced it. This continued compatibility, no matter how tenuous, really stands out to me in an era of endemic obsolescence and many online services, games or otherwise, barely making it five years before they’re gone for good.

My Steam account to this very day is the one my brother made on first getting Half-Life 2 back in 2004⁠—it feels like an heirloom passed down to me or something, and continuity like this in the digital realm is so rare I feel like it should always be cherished. If nicl83’s investigation has you feeling nostalgic, we have a chronicle of Steam’s long history (opens in new tab) and how the client has changed, as well as my recent marveling at how far the official website has come (opens in new tab). You can also follow nicl83’s YouTube channel (opens in new tab) for their future projects and Portal speedruns. 

Dark Souls 1 fans had to feed a mute, chronically ill spider lady like fifteen to twenty human souls to open a secret door and kill a giant glowing house centipede before progressing past an uncommunicated point of no return in the main quest where it would drive memetic bro Solaire of Astora insane. 

And you know what? We loved it. Even in the age of the internet, FromSoft games still have a capacity for sparking playground rumor-style obsessions over their hidden secrets. Reminiscent of Triforce-in-Ocarina of Time rumors spawned by Nintendo Uncle-having liars, the Soulsborne games have their weird little legends. A literally useless pendant (opens in new tab) in Dark Souls drove many to the brink trying to uncover the capital-T Truth it represented. We’re like Brother Corhyn in Elden Ring trying to make sense of Goldmask’s weird finger twitches.

In the year since Elden Ring’s release, dataminers like Zullie the Witch, Lance McDonald, and Sekiro Dubi have uncovered troves of mechanics and storylines that didn’t make it to the final game⁠—my favorite remains the horrifying tale of Merchant Kalé reconstructed by Sekiro Dubi. One of the most memorable sagas, though, was that of the cut content that was missing for just under a month.

We all just assumed it was on purpose.

Nepheli Loux (opens in new tab) is primed to be a fan-favorite friendly face like Solaire or Siegward, an early-game summon with a sense for justice who shares a last name with a legendary barbarian chieftain. After fighting Godrick with her at Stormveil and investigating the destroyed Albinauric Village, she’d just kinda… hang out and be sad for the rest of the game. At launch, the only definitive ending to be had for Nepheli was a fate worse than death in Seluvis’ questline (opens in new tab), and I recall people assuming that this was the intended conclusion for her story.

There was a similar lack of resolution, sad or otherwise, for a slate of other NPCs: Diallos (opens in new tab), Gostoc, Kenneth Haight, and Patches (opens in new tab) would all disappear or stay in one place, repeating the same voice line, but with no real sense of closure. Iron Fist Alexander (opens in new tab) would drop his gruesome innards as an item on his untimely death, with seemingly no place to use them.

And we all just assumed it was on purpose. Like with the impossibly buried Three Fingers (opens in new tab) or obscure Ranni questline (opens in new tab), there surely had to be something we were missing! Either that, or these stories were never meant to be finished, and FromSoft at its austere remove wanted us to meditate on the transience and imperfection of real life stories.

Nah, they were all meant to be normal, completable quests, not particularly more obscure than any other, and FromSoft just ran out of time implementing them. Patch 1.03 (opens in new tab) less than a month after launch added in the Jar Bairn, Alexander’s nephew who would accept his remains. Nepheli could be made the new ruler of Limgrave on receipt of the Stormhawk King’s ashes, with Gostoc and Haight at her side. Diallos would become a true warrior in defense of the town of Jarburg, and Patches would go on a cross-country sightseeing trip after Volcano Manor.

It was a little post-launch patch, covering up some minor oopsies in the game, but it felt like an absolute event. After all the speculation, we got these satisfying conclusions to all these stories. Some of them are quite surprising too⁠—there’s nothing in the early stages of Nepheli’s quest to suggest she’d rule Stormveil, or that Diallos would befriend Alexander’s nephew. It’s like the end of a Yakuza game when the protagonists finally meet⁠—your favs are teaming up!

We got a little reprisal of this feeling with the opening of Elden Ring’s PvP colosseums (opens in new tab), turning these massive structures that initially served no purpose into a multiplayer feature. We speculated (opens in new tab) as to their purpose for months, and though I still kinda wish they hosted a boss rush mode instead, it was still cathartic to see them finally put to use. Now all that communal energy is directed toward Elden Ring’s anticipated expansion, whenever that may come (opens in new tab).