Time to review a game about solving complex puzzles in order to decode secret messages. Developed by Matthew Brown, let’s take a look at Cypher.

Cypher is a simple game, but an intriguing one as well. There’s no real story, characters, or purpose. It plays more like an interactive museum dedicated to the art of secret messages.

In this museum, you move from room to room, each themed around a different kind of encryption and containing puzzles to solve. Simply walk up to a word puzzle and try to determine its hidden meaning. 

There are hints available by asking for them from the console as well as additional information within the rooms to inform the player of anything they might not have known before playing such as morse code or binary.

After solving enough puzzles, the next room opens up and the game continues on until finished. It’s a challenging experience, but one that’s equally rewarding each time you figure out a really difficult conundrum. Some will require thinking outside the box and even more will require a lot of patience and determination, but in the end the effort is entirely worth it.

And when I say this game is hard, I mean it. I’m a computer engineer, so noticing patterns and figuring out algorithms is something I’m trained to do, but I still had to break out the old pen and paper to figure out some of the trickier puzzles- some of which took upwards of 30 minutes to solve. Seriously, take a look at my notes from just the first few rooms (with the solutions covered up of course)!

Despite the lack of a story, the presentation doesn’t slack. The all white environment makes for an otherworldly aesthetic that really compliments the puzzling gameplay and the gentle classical score gives the game a hint of sophistication while also adding to the museum-like setting.

There are even small write ups on the history of cryptography and each new kind of encryption in the different rooms. Which means that if nothing else, you’ll probably leave this game having learned a thing or two.

However, this game does have a few missteps in its execution. First, some of the puzzles simply can’t be solved without the hints. It sucks to be stuck on a problem for quite a while only to realize after having relented that the game hid crucial information from you the entire time.

Some of the text is also a bit difficult to make out. For example, in this message containing letters of different sizes it’s hard to see which letters are which size compared to others and color coding may have been a better way to discern which was which. This can be made even worse with the visual bugs present like the dots on the wall here moving around relative to your position.

Lastly, I’m struggling to come up with a reason this needed to be a video game. All of these puzzles could have just as easily been presented on a sheet of paper and the game never really does anything interesting with the interactive medium. Even if the simple presentation does offer some sort of compliment to the puzzles.

What this all boils down to is an original, but simple game that’s worth the five dollars spent on it, but only if you really enjoy brain teasers. Which is why Cypher for the PC gets a 7.5 out of 10.

If you’re easily discouraged by a difficult mind bender, this may not be the game for you, but for those up for the challenge, it’s a great experience through and through. I hope you enjoyed the review, if you did, please consider subscribing for more. And until next time, have a mighty nifty day today!