CIPHER ZERO

Cipher Zero is ostensibly a puzzle game about discovering the rules of glyphs à la [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/]The Witness[/url] or [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/]Taiji[/url], and then using those rules to solve grid puzzles. I found it to be more style than substance; while it's aesthetically very pleasing, its puzzle and game design are not. [h3]Design flaws[/h3] Here's a list of design flaws that irritated me and which made this game a painful experience despite my love for the rules discovery genre: [list][*] The rule discovery is ultimately a small part of the gameplay relative to solving grid puzzles. In particular, in contrast to The Witness or Taiji, submitting the level solution always displays *for each individual glyph* whether it's solved, rather than merely telling you whether the level is solved in its entirety. This makes it trivially easy to discover glyph rules, which thus shifts the game's emphasis from rules discovery far towards solving puzzles. [*] Level progression is completely linear; if you're stuck in any level (which supposedly number 373), you're stuck, period. There are no side branches, optional levels, in-game hints, etc. This combination is poison for puzzle games in general, and it's even worse in a rules discovery game. [*] As a result of the terrible level progression, the gameplay experience consists of very few aha moments from discovering the rules of new glyphs, some time spent blitzing through a ton of trivially easy puzzles, and the majority spent bashing one's head against the most recent hard level. [*] Speaking of those hard levels, a significant fraction of them don't lend themselves to incremental puzzle solving. I often had more success using trial & error than actually puzzling things out. And conversely, solving the easier levels also often felt trial-and-error-y, particularly because the game doesn't enforce unique puzzle solutions. Overall, the incrementally solvable puzzles were decent; the others were not. [*] On that same note, since the game values its minimalist aesthetic over playability, there aren't enough in-game tools to puzzle things out. You can mark individual tiles in one of three colors, that's it. This is by no means sufficient to solve hard puzzles. As usual, devs, if you expect me to take notes to solve a puzzle, you NEED to implement an in-game note-taking / drawing tool à la [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/709920/]Tametsi[/url]. [*] And if you exit a level and return to it, marks remain but activated cells do not, so you can't even use a simple marking rule of "mark all cells in yellow if you're sure they're (not) activated". [*] Also, *a lot* of puzzles require counting tiles (e.g. if there are 20 tiles and glyphs worth 20 tiles, you know every tile must be part of a glyph), but there's no in-game area counter either. [*] And the final 1-2 worlds feature drawing mirrored paths, which is neat, but mostly challenges execution, not insight. Plus the UI is once again woefully insufficient: when you flag tiles, the mirrored tiles aren't automatically marked at the same time, which makes for a very tedious marking process. [*] Due to the lack of a hints system, you're all but guaranteed to need to Alt+Tab out to check walkthroughs (I ultimately looked up solutions to 33 puzzles). And given the aforementioned plethora of design flaws, it should be no surprise that the default keyboard config is that Tab clears the grid of the current puzzle, and thus so does using Alt+Tab... [*] Regarding the aesthetics and the music, they're genuinely pretty and pleasing, but they also have ~zero relation to the gameplay. [/list] [h3]How puzzle games can do better[/h3] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/MondSemmel/recommended/4160210]The Artisan of Glimmith[/url] is a good example of a superior puzzle game design. It allows for incremental puzzle-solving, has a nonlinear level progression and offers targeted incremental hints (rather than having to choose between being stuck or looking up a walkthrough), has an on-screen drawing tool and much more comfortable tile-marking, and so on and so forth. [h3]Overall verdict[/h3] Definitely not recommended. Some superior games I'll recommend include The Witness, Taiji, The Artisan of Glimmith, etc.

For those who enjoyed the induction panels of The Witness, CIPHER ZERO offers over 300 more to put your logical brain to the test. Compared to The Witness, this is a more straightforward affair, with some lovely animated background art and music to counterbalance the monochromatic puzzles. Intuitive yet tricky, this one is certainly worth checking out.

Very stylish, and good implementation of rule discovery, but I didn't find the puzzles themselves very satisfying. I solved many within seconds, on my first try; there were usually just one or two puzzles per level that felt like a satisfying challenge. I might've liked the game more if there were fewer puzzles, but each one taught you something new. Also didn't like the final stage of the game, which seemed to have a sudden and steep difficulty spike. Overall, not a bad puzzle game by any means, but not quite good enough that I'd recommend it over others like it.

A little bit of a boring one, unpleasant difficulty spikes happen a lot, pretty sure you can find something better then that, but hey, it's not a bad game at all i'd like to say, but eventually it's pretty boring and underwellming bc of a lot of other small factors :(

A very enjoyable puzzle game! The game taught its mechanics very gently and I enjoyed the variety of mechanics and the creativity with which they were utilized. I was a bit sad that the visuals of the game had so little to do with the puzzles, and there was a specific mechanic that required a bit too much cell-counting for my tastes (clusters), but overall I had a very good time. The music was a bit oppressive at times but I enjoyed the audio design and visuals a lot.

Had to abort the game because it got too hard in the end, but I really enjoyed the game so far. It's a rule discovery game, very much like The Witness but without the whole 3D overworld thingy. In almost every world a new symbol is introduced and you have to figure out the rule it describes. In the later levels of a world the new symbol is then combined with the ones already known to create even harder tasks. Unfortunately the game fails to introduce the last 1-2 symbols properly. I needed to read up upon them to understand what was asked of me. This was also the point where I lost interest in the game as I play these mostly for relaxation. I recommend this game as I think others might be able to figure out stuff better than me.

Beautiful Game with nice challenging puzzles. I really and i mean *REALLY* love discovering rules to games instead of them being told to me. I just love it when the game respects me as an intelligent individual. The puzzles are nice, i'm not sure how exactly more difficult the puzzles become, but so far almost through with powerplant, i haven't sit on a puzzle more than 5 minutes, which in my experience is pretty good and i'm sure they will just become even more challenging and probably will take me even longer in the end game :) Game Sound design and music is really beautiful, too! ~ Sora

More mixed than wholly negative but Steam has a binary system but I'm slightly more critical than positive. Lots of issues in an otherwise excellent puzzle game, some of the rules are extremely hard to grasp even after the tutorials introducing them but for the most part it's understandable what you're meant to do. My biggest problem however is that the game will oscillate between extremely easy puzzles and very difficult puzzles constantly and it just makes the pacing quite bad. I'll spend a few minutes working on one and then solve the next in one or two tries immediately and it just doesn't feel satisfying this way. I understand people will all think differently so it's hard to make a consistent difficulty when bouncing between different mechanics but for me it wasn't a great time. The game also for some reason continues to read your keyboard/mouse inputs when not tabbed into the game? I tend to keep this game open and work on it while doing something else and every time I tab out to my other monitor my keystrokes/scroll wheel get picked up by the game?? Extremely weird behavior. The UI is also way too compact, its really easy to hit previous puzzle when trying to submit an answer due to how close the buttons are but that's a nitpick and I know it, just worth pointing out. So yeah, not sure if I'd recommend unless you really enjoy piling on different rulesets but it never gets that complex or involved and the few puzzles that do use a large subset of rules feel more tedious troubleshooting which is incorrect than they do satisfying. Really conflicted on this game.

good, short, medium difficulty puzzle game