One yellow in two guesses isn’t the sort of start anyone hopes to have with their Wordle, but that’s all I had to work with today. My third guess was technically much better—three greens there—although it still took two more very worried goes to finally reveal today’s Wordle answer.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, July 22

A person or animal who suddenly stops moving, perhaps out of fear, might be performing today’s answer. Anything so cold it could freeze could also be described in this way. You’ll need to find two different vowels to solve this one. 

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

No letters are used twice in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playing Wordle well, which is why I’m going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success: 

• A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants. 
• A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The solution may contain repeat letters.

There’s no time pressure beyond making sure it’s done by midnight. So there’s no reason not to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. 

Today’s Wordle answer

What is the #763 Wordle answer?

I’ve got just the word you’re looking for. The answer to the July 22 (763) Wordle is FROZE.

Previous answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today’s Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that’s already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle solutions:

• July 21: BURLY
• July 20: FLANK
• July 19: TONIC
• July 18: FLYER
• July 17: DROOP
• July 16: TOPAZ
• July 15: CRONE
• July 14: FIEND
• July 13: BARGE
• July 12: WHIRL

Learn more about Wordle

Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it’s up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.

You’ll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you 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.

You’ll want your second go to compliment the first, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying 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 right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, 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, 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, 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. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

If you’ve not played Elden Ring, Miriel is a big turtle in a pope hat that hangs out at the Church of Vows, able to absolve your sins and supply you with faith magic. If you have played Elden Ring and you haven’t found him, here’s a guide on how to do that, because you should.

He also happens to be the chillest NPC in all of FromSoftware canon, just barely beating Solaire—known by the fanbase as “sun bro”—out of the running. And now he’s here, in the real world. You can pet him. What a time to be alive.

The description, punctuated entirely with exclamation points, promises that the plushie is “9 inches tall”, “packed to the seams with 100% PP cotton”, and “absolutely perfect for cuddling”. I do sort of think it looks like a standard turtle plushie design with a pope hat stapled to it, but Miriel’s in-game equivalent is just a literal turtle with a hat, so it’s fitting.

The turtle pope plushie only ships to the United States and Canada, which fills my UK heart with an incandescent rage and a bottomless sorrow, and will run you $29.99 USD. There are also a couple of less cuddly Elden Ring items available, such as a statue of Iron First Alexander or Melina, but do either really hold a candle to turtle pope? I think not.

Starfield officially launches on September 6, but if every day without Bethesda’s latest ambitious adventure feels like an eternity, you can play it up to five eternities sooner with Early Access. Joining an increasing number of big game releases in recent times (like Diablo 4), Bethesda has opted to let you jump the starting laser pistol if you pre-order one of the more expensive available editions. Here’s everything you need to know about Starfield Early Access and when you can play.

How “Early” is Starfield Early Access?

The specific wording Bethesda uses is “up to five days,” with a note that “actual play time depends on purchase date and will be subject to possible outages and applicable time zone differences.” The simpler version is that, barring any unforeseen technical issues, you should be able to cruise the spaceways sometime on September 1 in most parts of the world. Starfield doesn’t require a constant internet connection to play, so the bit about outages is probably just referring to issues Steam or the Xbox desktop app may run into installing and validating your copy.

How do you get Starfield Early Access?

Riot is shutting down a third-party Valorant app that gives players an early advantage in character selection.

Unofficial companion apps for multiplayer games usually exist to provide enhanced (and harmless) stat tracking or live ranking insights. Recon Bolt, made by developer Julian Dunskus, probably attracted Riot’s ire for its most unique feature: the ability to instalock characters on your phone before the option is available on PC (as spotted by Dexerto). 

I Tested XP in All 130 Dungeons & Strongholds So You Don’t Have To from r/diablo4

The hero in question is a player named Drybear, who has “hand-tested every single permanent Dungeon and Stronghold in the game and compared them together for clear speed, mob density, and how valuable your time is per second spent in that encounter,” with the aim of creating a “resource that the Diablo IV community could use to determine the best source of Experience at any given level.” The fruit of his labours is—what else?—a spreadsheet of great and terrible power.

Drybear went out of his way to make sure his findings were as accurate as possible. In order to account for differences in monster level—the fact that running a dungeon at a low player level would spit out different XP than running it again at a higher level—he went through the laborious work of “hand counting every mob in the dungeon,” before “comparing the mob density across all of them”. It’s a lot of work and, while I imagine there are probably some faults with the data, the lengths Drybear went to are both impressive and slightly frightening.

You can find the full results over at Drybear’s publicly-available Google Sheets page, where each one of the game’s 130 dungeons is broken down according to the speed you can clear it in, how much XP it spits out for solo and group players, its “farm lanes” (which I admit is too deep a level of Diablo 4 strategizing for me to parse), and various other bits and bobs of information. It’s comprehensive, in essence, and should allow anyone dedicated to efficiency in all aspects of the game to put together a clever, custom-made plan to maximise their returns at all times.

For the rest of us? Drybear put together a one-sheet summary that will just tell you where to go based on whether you’re playing solo or partied-up. It even has an optimal route you can follow. There’s also a video version, because science has to be a multimedia affair these days to catch public attention.

There is an elephant in the room here, of course. Blizzard is all set to kick off Diablo 4 season 1 on Thursday this week, a big shift that could well invalidate a lot of Drybear’s findings. If that happens, then it’ll probably be a matter of time before he—or someone like him—is out there doing it all over again to keep the spreadsheet up to date. God bless you, Diablo 4 community, you are all kind of terrifying.