The atmosphere is lovely, the music and characters and setting intriguing, but the interface and lack of tutorialization already feels like it going to kill the game dead before it flies.
So I copy pasted into the archive “The Duel”, “Duel”, “Cipher Manual”, “The Cipher Manual”, “3 7 ZRD NEE JOK HZR OEZ DIX”, “Poems”, and finally “Arthur Birdwhistle” which visibly got something.
Right away, there is a major bug that took me half an hour and a restart to work out: users who copy and paste in search terms because they don’t want to misspell things or are pasting from notes don’t get the necessary progression document. It pops on “cipher” not “cipher manual”. Assume some users copy paste, not type.
It’s hard to notice the phone is ringing if sound is muted. The icon should pulse.
It struck me that the font on the example cipher is kind of hard to read for certain characters, because it’s compressed.
I couldn’t figure out how to decrypt the message after clicking around looking for some sort of decrypt tab to put both documents and the words in. Eventually I pinned both documents in multiple view, but it still took me a solid 10 minutes to find grid view and figure out the game wants you to decrypt the cipher manually and get “johnzd oezeri kzredx” which works out to “john doe erik red”. (BTW, I can’t highlight multiple boxes to delete things in grid view. It feels like it would be easier to have MS Excel open than use the in-game interface which has you delete one by one)
I don’t think most players are going to have patience for this, especially if they get stuck and aren’t sure which documents might be keys and need to test multiple docs. There really should be a separate decrypt tab that will let you input a possible key, input the encrypted message, and it will do all the ordering for you. You can decide if the readout makes sense or not.
So then I searched in the database for a “John Doe” and then an “Erik Red” because you’d logically search individual names in a database, right? Wrong! You had to search “John Doe Erik Red” as one big blob.
I’ve kind of exhausted my patience for now, so I’ll come back and see where it is in six months or a year.
