DISCLAIMER:
This review is entirely for my own sake. You are welcome to read it but it may or may not contain spoilers for the whole game.

I went in with no expectations, really. In fact, I do not even remember where I found out about this game, I just know that it's been on my "to play later" list for a while and I finally decide to crack it open. And I'm glad I did, because it was highly enjoyable.

The game has around 150 cryptography puzzles that vary in both complexity and difficulty. This is to be expected as the game is intended to be a non-linear experience. Many times you will find yourself stumped on a puzzle that makes no sense, only to later find a clue in an unrelated thread that makes everything fall into place.

It's worth pointing out that the game gives you all the tools you need to solve puzzles without having to open a browser with 10 tabs to translate morse, binary, hex, etc. The only exceptions I had to make were for a couple of anagrams I was personally struggling with and for one morse code without spaces. (The ammount of possibilities is just to great to do it by hand)

The game does have a hint system. There are 3 hints available for each puzzle (that totals over 300 hand-crafted hints) and their only ! cost is time. First hint takes a minute to unlock, second takes 2, and third takes 3. I assume this is to encourage more thinking on the same puzzle or on a different one during the wait. The problem is that the hints' usefulness is highly variable. Hint 1 usually just points out what is the useful data you should be looking at, hint 2 tends to mention which tool to use or the amount of characters, and hint 3 tells you the specific trick of the puzzle without giving away the answer. So it's annoying when you are stuck on a puzzle and after waiting for a hint it just says "six red letters." Yes I know that, but what do I do with them? And then I have to wait for another hint to say "Use a tool." Of course, but which one?

Lore-wise, it's a very simple "AI gone rogue" story, but it does the job and it surprisigly doesn't seem to have evil intentions. Serviceable, but not a strong suit.

I would have appreciated it if the game had any sort of audio. A background track and some sound puzzles would have been welcome. So feel free to play this with a playlist of your choice running.

! The ending does take into consideration the amount of hints used, but after seeing all endings the difference is so minor that it's not worth bothering to avoid hints.

Overall, I had tons of fun with the puzzles and the non-linearity made it feel metroidvania-esque at times. If it ever gets a paid release, I'll buy it day one. Highly recommended for puzzle lovers.

The game kept insulting me in the hints while i was putting in "flake" desperately (the answer was snowflake). Society if earlier hints could be skipped.

The message is clear when you enter the game: "Change da world. My final message. Goodb ye". That same anonymous e-girl who sent the message, owner of a blahaj and programmer socks (it sucks to be me why do I think of that first) also hands you out the class sheets because you forgot to note them down. You're cursed for eternity to be stuck on the laptop's front page with minimized tabs but you feel extra smart finding the keywords so go find the whole 151 pack of them to be a Progémon master!

What I tend to like about puzzle games like this is how they can often be a glimpse into the thought process of their developers, where you have to get to know them and think on their wavelength if you want to get through, and IMO this game excels at that. Its particular focus is on code-cracking — finding keywords in a sea of gibberish and using that to decrypt and access further puzzles — and all the different little languages that have historically been used to hide secret messages. I really like how the game always manages to iterate in how it applies codes to crack: for how… surprisingly large the game is it almost never repeats itself, each puzzle feeling new and at some points incredibly creative (to the point where I absolutely don’t wanna give examples since I’d be actively spoiling the game if I did so). I’m also really into how the game manages to wrap around itself in terms of progression: sometimes it takes a Metroidvania-ish approach and requires you to reach a later puzzle before you can solve an earlier puzzle. Sometimes an earlier puzzle becomes a tool in itself to solve a later puzzle. Sometimes you think you’re solving something else entirely and then when you uncover part of a picture you’ll see the symbol that signifies you have to translate something into binary and you’ll sit there, for a second, as what you have to actually do all begins to click together in your head. Most of all, it’s surprisingly variant: various different skills are tested, you’re not going to eat shit the whole game just because you’re bad at one particular thing. Not to mention how low-key great the graphic design is (I love how when you start up the game the circle behind the puzzle select screen piecharts your completion percentage) and how neat it is to see the story slowly uncover through all the emails you read and files you decrypt.

I will say, though, I’m nooooot a big fan of the in-built hint system, mostly because of its at-a-lot-of-points questionable worth compared to how much time you have to sink into it. The hint system works on a timer: if you want a hint for a puzzle, you have to wait a minute to get it. A second hint, two minutes. Your last hint, three. It’s an interesting approach, and I like how it theoretically encourages you to give something else a try while you wait for the game to drop you a hint, but the quality of the hints you get varies wildly. Sometimes they were the mental kick I needed to solve the puzzle, but a lot of the time I had to wait up to five minutes to be told about the part of the puzzle I’d already figured out. This… bottlenecks you hard, especially when there’s a puzzle where you’re immediately like ???: you spend a lot of time staring at the game, trying to see if you can brute force your brain into figuring it out, while the timer ticks down endlessly for a hint you don’t even know will actually help. This is compounded by how the game also thinks, sometimes, that what it tells you is more comprehensive than it actually is. There’s one puzzle in the first quadrant where you have to translate every o and i in an email to part of a code, and, like… does that include capital letters? Does it include letters in the subject/date of the email? I put so many different variations in and not once got the actually correct answer, and honestly I still don’t know what exactly counted, or whether there was an o or i I didn’t see. There were a lot of puzzles like that, and, consequently, a lot of puzzles where I needed outside help to solve because what the game gave me didn’t feel like enough.

But aside from that, I liked this! It was fun, cerebral, surprisingly meaty, and it was honestly really cool to learn all about cyphers, and, consequently, how to solve some of the more common kinds. I recommend it! Juuuuust don’t play it all in one day. It’ll make your head spin. Literally. I marathoned it on and off for like eight hours and now wherever I look my vision spirals in on itself. It kinda hurts