Catyph: The Kunci Experiment

An amazing puzzle game with a complex storyline! But first of all, Catyph is not a game for everyone. As a sequel to ASA: a space adventure, it is a classic Myst-like or Rhem-like in terms of gameplay, but it is way much more difficult. Clues are not directly apparent and require some very good observation skills and intuition (you need to figure out if something you see is a clue or simply just part of the surrounding world). Puzzles are very diverse as in the previous opus ASA, but are more difficult. Curiosity and perseverance are a requirement. But even then, it will still be sometimes necessary to take a look into the walkthrough... I quite enjoyed the wide diversity offered by the exploration in the game. While exploring 6 beautiful worlds in completely different environments, you will be able to use different modes of teleportation, experience time travel, pilot a submarine robot while dodging some prehistoric creature, explore the inside of some beautiful painting… I really had a lot of fun solving the puzzles. In fact, I became so engrossed in trying to solve them, that I completely lost track of the storyline and forgot about reading the database… After spending hours grinding my teeth on the puzzles, I realized that the storyline videos were kind of messed up since I had moved back and forth between worlds when I was stuck. Since I had not followed at all the storyline, I decided to start over, and this time, exploring each world one at a time (which I recommend), watching and reading everything. About the storyline, the game starts with a video that was, I have to admit, kind of confusing on the first view. Watching it again later while knowing more about the game world helped. The story takes place in a parallel world of our solar system. You play as an astronaut who is equipped with a (super-) suit that can be controlled by a (very knowledgeable) AI named MAIDEN. A database storing all informations about the storyline and the game world, as well as a system producing blue energy (some new energy discovered after the events that occured in ASA) are integrated in the suit. This blue matter system can be used to create a shield to protect you, increase your strength, or simply emit blue energy particles to interact with objects made of dark matter. It can be recharged using blue matter wells located a bit everywhere or by playing some minigames (one located in your database and one that is found later in one of the worlds). As part of an exploration team of planet Catyph and its moons, you travel and land by yourself on the 6th moon of Catyph where an alien construction with a huge black cube has been sighted. Approching the cube, you accidently activate a mine field surrounding it. Protected by the shield of your suit, you find yourself projected towards the cube which then teleports both of you on the 5th moon of Catyph, Tytaah, using a technology, you learned later, called the Kunci. There, you discover more alien constructions and start to investigate. After fixing a teleporter, you will be tasked to collect black dices in order to save your own planet Terra. To do this, you will have to explore the 6 differents continents (worlds) of Tytaah. The storyline is very rich with a lot of details, but might be somewhat technically too complex for some people. But contrary to ASA where we had to use a lot of the astronaut diary content to solve puzzles, the disappointing part here was that most of the reading content is useless to play the game. I think only three puzzles use some little information from the database. So I would say that the database is mostly destined to people who like reading and are curious to learn more about the black cube series world. To continue the comparison to ASA, Catyph offers better graphics and a greatly improved AI. In ASA, the AI made me feel like a small kid. In Catyph, it made me feel like a scientist, telling me all kind of scientific informations about the environment. I found that kind of cool. I would recommend playing the previous opus ASA first. Puzzles are mostly easier and it starts as a good introduction to the black cube serie and helps understand Catyph storyline better as it refers a lot to facts and characters previously introduced in ASA. In all, I found that Catyph was an amazing game, all the more impressive as it was achieved by only one person. There are sadly so few challenging puzzle games nowadays that it really was a pleasure to play this game. So big thanks to the developper to have brought us such a wonderful game. I am looking forward to the next opus!

На мой взгляд, это игра 1990-х годов. Игра рассчитана на фанатов жанра. Управление - щелкай только мышкой, тебя самого перенесут из одной локации в другую. Оглянуться по сторонам - щелкай мышкой, тебя развернут на 180 или 90 градусов. Головоломки не удобно решать, так как приходится совершать много однотипных действий на разных локациях и возвращаться обратно. Знание английского/француского языка для прохождения нужно, иначе не понятен будет сюжет, и играть будет еще более некомфортно. На любителя игра. Приобретать надо со скидкой. Это первое впечатление, потом обзор добавлю новыми.

Catyph est un jeu rare où le joueur est au centre de cet univers original crée par un dessinateur-développeur. Ne vous laissez pas déstabiliser par les difficultés apparentes. Prenez votre temps, denrée ô combien précieuse et ignorée de nos jours, et accéder à la vérité de ce voyage spatial initiatique. Catyph is one of these rare video games where the player is the central element of its original univers. Don't let the difficulties destabilize you. Take your time, a such precious commodity, and unveil the truth hidden in this spatial journey of initiation.

Catyph est un jeu avec de superbes graphiques, des différents "mondes" ou îles. Il y a différentes manières du jeu, plus facile à très difficile. Les amateurs de jeux "Myst-Like" trouveront leur bonheur, même si les énigmes sont souvent assez difficiles, les indices se trouvent toujours dans le même monde. Pour ma part j'ai joué pendant 33 heures, ce qui est une bonne durée de vie pour un jeu d'aventure point/click.

I love a good 90's style point-and-click, but this one was tedious. While some of the puzzles were reasonably fun, most seemed to require a degree in math or linguistics. It would take hours to solve each puzzle (one, for example, involved a lengthy translation from an alien language). The voice-acting was terrible, and the graphics were very very old-school. The "point and click" style made getting around a chore, and it was very easy to miss rooms/areas because of the awkward movement dynamics and the way a lot of areas looked identical. The story didn't make much sense (too convoluted, too many things going on), and the characters presented were caricatures--it was hard to care about what was happening on "Terra" and the "bad guy" was so bad he could have been The Master in a 60's episode of Doctor Who (see: mustache-twirling, maniacal laugh). With most Myst-style games, the puzzles are so cool and interesting you genuinely want to solve them on your own. There is always some kind of narrative payoff for solving a puzzle as well (a secret revealed!). Here, you'd slog through six worlds, solving puzzles, and your only reward would be more mustache-twirling dialogue (in a very bad English accent!) from the villain, or another video message from the general (who is depicted as an African American, cigar-smoking military vet, but voiced by what sounds like a 19-year old, white, Yale grad. I guess Morgan Freeman was busy that day). Although you could tell they tried to make the puzzles "make sense" to the logic of the worlds, it was clear that most were, in a personal pet-peeve of mine, puzzles for the sake of puzzles. THE MOST FRUSTRATING ASPECT OF ALL was the inability to take pictures of hints when you came across them. I wound up having to take pictures of my screen with my phone, to avoid having to take a million pages of handwritten notes (WHY????). The clues would be so elaborate that there was no way I was going to write all that crap down. Even then, I am not wasting my life translating things to binary code, mmmm kay, designers? That's the definition of a pain-staking, tedious puzzle that is Not Fun to do.

excellent game, in the vein of Myst, old 2D pre-calculated! But beautiful and modern. rather difficult puzzles that require patience and observation! Many landscapes, many "worlds". Different game modes, allowing everyone to join in the fun! a good thirty hours in "cheating" and probably much in "looking" :) thank you for this adventure!

A fun and interesting puzzle game set in space. Most reminiscent of Myst, except in space...like moonmyst? Mostly a point and click adventure with a lot of story and then puzzles to solve. https://youtu.be/dbI9m4qJAi4

Catyph is the second game in the Black Cube series (it is a sequel to ASA), which can be described as a sci-fi puzzle adventure. You are an astronaut, sent to one of the moons of Catyph (a large gas giant that resembles Saturn) where you discover a mysterious black cube. Entering the cube transports you to one of the other moons, Tytaah, where most of the story takes place. You travel to different regions of Tytaah in order to unlock the mysteries of the cube, while Terra (your home planet) is under the threat of a strange spacecraft. There are two editions of the game, “Original” and “Light”, and you get to select which version you want to play at the beginning of the game. After experimenting a little bit, I opted for the original version, which features transition cutscenes between scenes. Light edition is supposed to improve the design of some puzzles, I wasn’t able to test that. Positive - I was pleasantly surprised by both the amount and quality of the puzzles in Catyph. ASA was fine, it was actually better than average, but it is this game where the designer Simon Mesnard unleashes his true puzzle design skills. Catyph is full of interesting and complex puzzles, and most of them are difficult to solve. Challenge and depth of the puzzles leads to a very exciting gameplay experience; it had been a while since I played a game that left me with this level of satisfaction. On top of that, the content and variety of the puzzles are also great. There are classical pattern matching and mechanical manipulation puzzles which are the staples of this genre, but there are also math puzzles, time manipulation puzzles, environment observation puzzles and even some cryptography puzzles. For the last one ,you actually need to learn the rules of an alien language at some point, which was very cool. Apart from some exceptions, which I will mention soon, Catyph was one of the most memorable and fun puzzle-fests I have played in a while. It is a remarkable achievement. - One of the major shortcomings of ASA was the weird navigation scheme, which made it very difficult to localize yourself in the game. Catyph fixes this issue by adding full video transitions between different nodes. Not only do they look great and improve the immersion, they also solve the navigation problem since now you can get a clear sense of where your character is moving between scenes. Graphics were also good, I especially liked how each main region of the game had a different feel and look. Overall this game looks and plays much better than ASA. - Music and sound design are well done. I loved the epicness of some tunes and the voice acting was also satisfactory. -I love that the in-game database provides a lot of info on the lore of the game. This database is essential for solving some of the puzzles, and you can also read it to gain more insight into this solar system and its history. Negative Although the majority of the puzzles are very good, there are also several under-clued and frustrating puzzles, where the solutions don't make sense even after reading the walkthrough. This game would deserve a near-perfect score if only these puzzles had better clues. It is a pity, I really wanted to give this game a 9+ score. The lore of the game is interesting, but the font of the text that depicts this lore is very small, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to read, since it is like 1000 words fit into a single screen. This would have been easily fixed by making the font bigger and adding a browsing bar. There is an in-game currency called blue matter, which you can earn by playing an arcade game at any point. You can spend this currency to get hints about puzzles, which is fine. What is not fine is, you also need to spend blue matter to activate cubes in the game, hence there is no escape from playing this arcade game. It is not that difficult, but it gets repetitive and annoying very quickly; I think gimmicks like this have no place in a puzzle adventure game. Light edition is supposed to remove this feature, but it also removes transition cutscenes, which I do not prefer. Conclusion Catyph is an amazing puzzle adventure with an intriguing story and tons of interesting challenges. A few weak puzzles prevents it from reaching its full potential, but nevertheless it is a very solid effort. Highly recommended to all Myst and puzzle adventure fans. Score: 8.5/10

Definitely something to check out if you like the MYST series. The overall plot was intriguing and the puzzles pretty hardcore.

oui bon jeu point and clic. assez difficile meme en light. je ne l aurais jamais fini sans la soluce. Dommage, il me manque 2 videos mais impossible de les debloquer pour obtenir la vraie fin du jeu... j espere que vous aimez le binaire ;)