Can Word Games Increase Your Memory Abilities?

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This is a timeless question, and the correct answer is that there is none. The number of apps on sale in all app stores that promise you a super-memory brain in just ten minutes a day has already grown out of proportion with scientific evidence. And it is very important to distinguish between marketing and the science behind.
In summary, word puzzles can affect certain skills and have no impact on others. It is crucial to understand this to properly evaluate the puzzles.

Research about it
The entire field of brain training suffered a tremendous disappointment in 2016 when one of the most famous companies had to agree to settle a lawsuit brought by the United States Federal Trade Commission against the claims in its advertisement that were not supported by any evidence. All this industry is like that: it helps in a limited scope of tasks, people get better at exercising, but their memory stays the same outside it.
The main concept here is called transfer.

Type of transferWhat it meansProven?
Near transferImprovement carries to closely related tasksYes, many times
Far transferImprovement carries to unrelated tasksNo, despite enormous research fundingRepeating of the sequence of digits improves your ability to remember digits. But it is not going to help you to find your keys.

What word puzzles can improve
Fortunately, there are plenty of benefits within the framework of near transfer.

• The speed of word retrieval improves. The regular practice of the game makes it easier for you to remember words from your memory under the certain constraints. Unable to name something although you are sure that you know it is the very skill that you develop.
• The spelling skills improve. Writing the letters of the words, again and again, with instant feedback about the mistakes is the perfect drill for memorizing how to spell them. This is how the flashcards work: you retrieve the information and get feedback.
• The pattern recognition improves. An experienced player doesn't calculate anything or thinks anything; certain combination of green and gray tiles suggests him the list of possible words automatically. This is the example of the expertise that comes from the experience.
• Your vocabulary becomes slightly wider due to your exposure to words you were aware of before but didn't pay any attention to.
  

Memory in particular
When playing the game, the working memory gets heavy loads, and this is undeniable. You have to keep track of several different things: confirmed letters, those that you have already excluded and the positional constraints for six tries. This is the example of the cognitive load.
But does it make your working memory larger? This is a completely different question, and the results of the research are disappointing. Working memory capacity is fairly stable in adults. Through practice, you become better at using strategies to use it, but not at making it larger.
Long-term memory is where the interesting result comes, but not in the way that people generally expect. Testing effect, i.e., the fact that the retrieval of the information improves the memory better than the review of it is the strongest finding in the field of cognitive psychology. Each attempt to guess the word puzzle is the attempt of information retrieval, so this format fits perfectly well for that. Therefore, it increases your memory of words. Not of appointments.

One point that no one mentions
It is quite fair to say that the main benefits of the puzzle games are non-cognitive.
Entertainment in general is the perfect way to break rumination. If you play the puzzle requiring your full attention during three minutes, you will get the real break from whatever you were thinking about, and this influences your memory since it is known that the chronic stress has a negative impact on memory.
Social engagement is another factor that is not often discussed, yet one of the few positively correlated with the better cognitive aging. The social engagement is what you get when you play the game with other people. And you don't get it when you play the app alone. The exchange of the words that you discovered yourself, or the multiplayer room where you compete against other people discovering the same words keeps the social aspect of the game. Wordle Unlimited gives everything, including the challenge link that you can share everywhere and multiplayer rooms at wordleunlimited.dev.

Conclusion
It is all right to play word puzzles because you like them, because you get three minutes of immersion, and because you will get much better at words. This is the real benefit, and it is enough.
Don't expect your memory to improve from it, and be suspicious of anything promised with such statements. To reap the real benefits, the number and variety is more important than any specific product, and this is an argument in favor of the format that you can play as much as you want, not rationed to one puzzle per day.