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.
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.
Lucca202
2 months ago