What’s The Password is a minimalistic code-cracking game that presents 108 4-digit codes for the player to find and solve. What marks this puzzler out from the crowd is the sheer variety of the puzzles on offer.
Codes can be found in visuals on screen that warp numbers into a picture, or it could be spotting that there is a triangle, a square, a hexagon, and an octagon in a pattern. Then there are pure maths questions where you are asked to total up someone’s takeaway order to create the 4-digit code. Many of the puzzles infer a pattern or ask players to follow or spot one. There are bar charts to look at, constellations of stars to draw numbers within, and some require you to flip what’s on the screen to reveal numbers for what hasn’t been shaded in.
What’s The Password? really shines when it starts to break the fourth wall. One question asks you to add together your music, volume, and total volume settings. Yes, you’ll need to. Another counts how many times you’ve clicked the mouse during the entire game. Others refer to real-world knowledge, like months with certain days in them, memorable dates, or planetary order. It doesn’t quite make What’s The Password? an internet sleuth experiment, but I did enjoy having to go and find out some facts to crack the code.
The minimalist black and white design is a choice that works throughout the playtime, with jazz club music adding to its noir charm. There were two things I didn’t appreciate. The first is that some puzzles provide a hint, which can be very helpful when faced with something entirely abstract. If you are still stuck, eventually a skip button will appear. The length of time it takes for the hint and/or skip button to appear seems to wildly vary with little rhyme or reason behind it. Just as frustrating, I ran into continuous frame rate and gameplay slowdowns. Every few minutes, the game would slow down to a crawl, with choppy sound and unresponsive controls. Initially, I thought it was the music looping, but I am unsure what is causing it. Apparently, this is a bug specific to me, and the developer is investigating it. On the plus side, many puzzles have randomised solutions, so you can return to them with slightly different setups should you skip them.
I think What’s The Password? does a great job within its limited scope. If the performance and hint system could be smoothed out, I’d enjoy the title a bit more. As it is, this is a clever, if uneven, collection of bitesized code cracking puzzles.
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