One thing that often surprises people that haven't studied other cultures is that, just like there are multiple languages in the world, not every civilization that existed used the same numbers. In fact, the Arabic numerals we use today are barely a millenium old, and only established themselves as the standard among Western cultures by the 15th century. Roman numerals are generally going to be a person's first introduction to a system that operates with different symbols and logic, but there are many others.

Among those are the Cistercian numerals, created in the 13th century by an order of monks of the same name that was widespread in Europe at the time. This system was designed to represent numbers from 1 to 9999, each with an individual glyph. It is no longer used, and one doesn't have to concern themselves with it unless they are reading medieval manuscripts... or if they happen to be playing Cipher Monk.

Cipher Monk takes the player through thirty five levels where they're tasked with reproducing a certain quantity in the Cistercian system. It provides a chart with several examples of numbers through which the player is expected to derive the intuition behind the system -- in this, the game could have done a better job of explaining the intuition behind certain patterns, which might not be immediately obvious to those who are only familiar with the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals. There was also a missed opportunity in introducing the history behind the system.

Better controls could also have been on the table... But then again, it's a one dollar game that lasts 30 minutes. It literally took me longer to research and write this short review than to fully complete it, so maybe it's best to keep expectations in check. For the asking price, it's a fun puzzle game to kill a small amount of time -- just make sure immediately click the eye on the top right corner to hide the "Current" number display, as relying on that resource can ruin the game.

The steam discovery queue is a bit like staring at an endless stream of runoff, but sometimes you get to look at something interesting. Cipher Monk caught my attention with the mention of it being based on a number system made by monks in the 13th century (and its 1 euro price tag).

Its definitely a low budget production, a very deliberately minimalistic puzzle game which still manages to control a bit stiff-ly but its otherwise well executed I'd say. Its method of tutorialisation could be accused of laziness, given its literally just a contextless cheat sheet of several numbers in the cistercian system and their arabic numeral equivalents, but I like how it makes the act of understanding the system into a puzzle of its own. Obviously if you have previous knowledge of the cistercian numerals this aspect will fall flat but if not (like I did(n't)) its a good time extrapolating and trying to use pattern recognition to work out the rules of the system.

Of course once you are comfortable with it the game actually throws you the curveball its based around (as otherwise the game would be little more than a rote converter from arabic to cistercian numerals) with a limited number of "characters" being needed to form each number and a few negative numbers thrown in to make you have to think about how to combine these additions and subtractions to make the target number within the logic of the cistercian numerals. They're not the greatest brain teasers ever, and I finished the whole thing in about 45 minutes, but it was a nice 45 minutes.

I do have to laugh, when Steam warned me that the game wasn't available in spanish. The game is in portuguese and english but all the language changes are the word "current" and "target" above the (no prizes for guessing) current and target number, everything else is pictographic, I'm pretty sure everyone on earth can play this regardless of what their mother tongue is.