CIPHER ZERO

Everything up to the last area is a pretty smooth puzzle game that for a minute is just a poor-man's Hexcells. The last area was grueling.

Slick, stylish puzzle game with beautiful art. The puzzles are fun and do a good job of letting you discover the rules as you go without being too easy or too hard. (Well, one particular gliph just did not click in my brain, but I don't think that's due to any fault of the developer.) Also, very nice music, and very nice use of the rumble if you play on controller.

While this game is aesthetically pleasing it feels very mechanical, fiddly, and unintuitive in a way other rule discovery games like the witness or taiji do not. after the initial sets of puzzles to learn a mechanic, which fall in line with the more intuitive approach of these other games, it quickly becomes something more about slowly working your way through a complicated process of elimination to get to solves; similar to a 'newspaper puzzle' like nonograms, queens, or minesweeper. It misses the elegance of something like a puzzle in the witness, where it's more about hitching on some specific eccentricity of the puzzle and solving that (resulting in a fun 'aha' moment when you figure out the trick) rather than a more slow, technical solve. The puzzles in this game don't follow the same philosophy, and I found myself relying on trial and error fairly quickly because they simply aren't immediate or readable enough to be a satisfying solve I feel clever for arriving at; feeling more like slow and meditative busywork. I can see this being an approach to puzzles some people enjoy, and that makes me wish I could leave a mixed review rather than a negative, though I'd like to warn people who like rule discovery puzzles and other such games that they likely won't get the experience they anticipate from this one.