The Cryptologist Room

Terrible controls, clunky movement, unclear objective ( objective says enter answer in the book, but what are we answering?) I spent 3 hours in first room and hours of research on LOTR and cannot figure out what the question is much less an answer. I like puzzle games and cryptograms but the first puzzle has no clear direction. not fun.

Major puzzle spoilers but in all honestly this is a skip: Alright, so first let's go over the basics of what makes a good puzzle because this game does not seem to understand the basic concept. A good puzzle should be solvable without brute forcing once you know exactly which elements are a part of it. Providing a random set of characters and telling the player to go "solve" it without giving you any clues is garbage. Hints should be there to actually help the player that's stuck, not be a mandatory part of the game, they are additions, frustration decreases for those in need of help. You gotta connect stuff so that it makes sense. If you want someone to use a Caesar cipher, put a picture of Caesar somewhere, or hell, hide a few of them in the room to instantly tell people how much to rotate by. Using random ciphers with random keys with no hints on what to do is not even a puzzle, it's boring busy work that just leads to frustration. Especially when you wanna give us a lesser known columnar transposition cipher or the horrible final Fibonacci shift at the end that came out of the left field. Want us to shift by Fibonacci? Then put some spirals somewhere, put a bunch of candl…

I tried the first puzzle and it racked my brain! An excellent switch from the horror games I've been playing. The graphics are excellent and the puzzles are really challenging! The only downfall I see is that there are many spelling errors (i.e. asnwer, rigns). It's a small thing, but it's noticeable when you have to analyze practically everything in order to progress. Otherwise, highly recommend so far!

Not a very good game. Heavily focused on extremely obscure aspects of Lord of the Rings. Very little variety in the puzzle solving. I regret purchasing this game. Waste of money

Great game, beautifully produced! The design and animation is excellent. Highly atmospheric. The cryptography is a bit hard for my pea brain, but good fun. Highly recommended puzzler (though good puzzle solving skill required)!

No one has the supposed "real world" knowledge as mentioned in the description of this "game". Or at least it's not THIS world's knowledge. Calling something challenging is one thing. When the required knowledge is so esoteric and specialized or it belongs to such a small subset of game players is the reason something is challenging? That's an entirely different animal.