Prose & Codes Bewertungen

Really gets your gears turning. Some of the difficult ciphers are indeed just that: difficult. But with some trial and error you'll still be getting somewhere. Definitely fun to play every once in a while.

I feel like I should have gotten the Demo for this game before buying the actual game. My understanding was that each level would be a uniquely designed riddle in a different cipher, where part of the challenge was also to figure out how the encryption system works. This game only has one type of cipher and it's the classic "each letter is encrypted by another random letter" and you have to slowly figure out what each word could be to solve the whole riddle. There are like 300-400 of these, so it's a bit repetitive. I just figured that this isn't really my type of riddle, but maybe it's yours. I don't really like that the starting letters that are given to you are randomized, so your starting letters could be V, X, Z or they could be A, E, O which makes the difficulty kind of arbitrary. English isn't my native language so some of the more prosaic text was really hard to do guesswork with, because these types of words just aren't that well-known to me. The developers seem really passionate about classic novels and other famous texts, and give excerpts, and summaries so you can learn more about all sorts of classic texts, but this also made the game a bit more boring for me, because instead of them giving me really interesting sentences that have a unique "riddle progress" to them, it's just random well-known sentences. E.g. a riddle where a sentence is only consisting of like 5 repeating letters, a sentence full of alliterations, or even something like "the quick brown fox...", which utilized ALL letters of the alphabet would have been more creative and enagaging than guessing sentences that aren't that structually unique all the time. After a while you just realize it's easiest to guess short words like "it" "a" "is" etc. first and then slowly fill in the blanks for the bigger words. Once the small words are all done, the riddle isn't very hard anymore, so it usually feels like a bit of randomly tapping in the dark at the beginning, randomly getting it right, and then quickly solving the rest of the riddle to start over. The riddles are sorted into categories of "Adventure", "Horror" and so on, but this doesn't really add anything to the experience, because it never helped me in guessing words or context, especially since the categories are so arbitrary (e.g. Frankenstein is in the "Horror" and not the "Sci-Fi" category, but it could have been in either). What would have been a lot more helpful would have been prompts like "The first sentence of a novel", "poems with rhymes", and so on, which would have allowed me to draw conclusions from one word to another while decoding. All in all, I think this could have been massively more interesting, which is a shame because the idea, UI design, and vibe of the game are really cool. I would say this is for people who really like classics, and who also really really really love these specific types of riddles. I think I already kind of fit the niche of both of these things, and for me it was still too repetitive. I think it would be really mean of me to give a thumbs down, though, but for me this was a pretty neutral experience.