Ink Cipher

A puzzle with simple rules but very challenging. Excellent value for the price, it's sure to please lovers of the genre but especially niche ones. The game might not please people who like other types of puzzles. So, know what you're buying, although for the price it's really worth a try.

I am trying to build a nice collection of puzzle games for my computer and just bought Ink Cipher and Simply Puzzles: Codewords. This is a pretty good quality game for $1. It took me about four and a half minutes to complete the first puzzle, and if you make a mistake it can be really difficult to find it. I never used to do many codewords puzzles when I had puzzle books, so this is a fairly new type of puzzle for me.

If you're into solving cryptograms or crossword puzzles, Ink Cipher may interest you, since it's sort of a combination of both. Given a set of interconnected horizontal and vertical "words" that have numbers in place of letters, try to figure out which letters correspond to which numbers, thus solving the puzzle. You're generally given 1-3 letters already solved to get things started. In the past this was often not enough, making some levels overly challenging to nearly impossible. A recently added feature allows you to buy correct letters at the expense of 1 minute added to the indicated time you used to solve the puzzle. This addition alone was enough to cause me to give the game a positive review. Another recent addition to the game is the ability to mute the sound. While a dedicated volume slider would have been preferable, this is good enough as I and others found the default sounds and volume to both be unpleasant. The game author has also recently added more puzzles to the game. It's always nice to see a game you already bought receive improvements. I wouldn't mind seeing some Steam Achievements added, but I'm not going to rate the game badly for not having them.