Cracked: Roguelike [encrypted] Launching Next Weekend
How curious!
If you want everything explained to you in a game, [encrypted] [official site] is probably not for you. Roguelikes have traditionally been a genre rife with curiosity and uncertainty, but that's faded somewhat in modern roguelikes and roguelikelikes. [encrypted] won't even let you read its text unless you do a little code-cracking, yet is intended to be intuitive for the curious.
It'll launch on Saturday, May 30th, developer Niall Moody announced today. Come have a look.
As it's a somewhat cryptic game, I can't intuit too much without playing myself, and shall entrust you to the gentle words of Moody:
"The game offers no tutorials or hand-holding of any kind, instead trusting the player to be able to figure it out on their own. Indeed, the game's mechanics are designed to be easily intuited by an attentive player.
"For those players who can crack the encryption, the game provides hooks so that they can plug in their own decryption code and have the text rendered in English as they play."
Sounds great, that. I will definitely not have a crack at the encryption myself, but am delighted by the idea of it. The game has procedural audio too, reacting to what's happening.
You can download an old build from August for free over here.
[encrypted] will be released on Windows and Mac through Itch priced at $5 (£3.20-ish). Paying at least $10 would also get you a zine about methods of text encryption and ways to crack them. Moody plans to release it during the event Feral Vector next weekend, where he's speaking and where Graham will be in attendance (and where I spoke last year). Anyway, look at this:
