Locktale is a cryptography game wrapped around telling a story about a queen of colours. Each level in the game tells a sentence or passage of a continuous story, but the cipher to unpick and write the story changes for every level. Be prepared to get your brain in gear, as Locktale is a brain-bender.
A cipher is a code that needs to be understood to translate the code into letters, words, and sentences. Initially, the game introduces simple ciphers, such as a numerical one like A=1, B=2, and so on. Then something more abstract might appear, like a colour spectrum. Other ciphers involve patterns or existing codes like Morse Code or playing cards or clock hands being added together to create a number. Depending on the difficulty level you’ve selected, you’ll be able to reveal a description of the cipher in use, with a link to a more detailed Wikipedia article about it. I was genuinely learning new concepts and ideas as I played Locktale, and that’s quite rare for a game to do.
As the decryption methods change constantly, I found Locktale was best played with either a mobile phone, a split screen, or pen and paper by your side. The game comes with some doodling pens to draw over the level screen, but I found that wasn’t very effective. I needed more room to work things out, especially when the game graduated to maths problems, grids of letters and numbers, and formulas to keep track of. If you select the easier two of four difficulties, the screen will contain some hints to get you started, allowing you to fill in a couple of letters. Sometimes that’s enough of a breadcrumb trail to work out the method and solve the rest. Other times, when using the “extra help” difficulty level, you can enter a question mark into a space to reveal a letter. I really liked the approach to progressive hint discovery, as it is entirely in the player’s hands just how far you can tweak it, and it can be changed per level.
The flipside of this is that sometimes, once you solve certain letters, words reveal themselves quite easily. As the story repeats words like princess, queen, and blue, you’ll spot them a mile off and then have partially completed letters without needing to solve the riddle. This did help me a few times when dealing with math-related ciphers, as I kept finding my answers were often 1 number step away from being correct. I couldn’t tell if I was misunderstanding things, or if they were written or coded ambiguously or incorrectly. I also ran into stuttering throughout my playtime. Locktale is not a graphically or CPU-taxing game. I have no idea why it kept stuttering, but it was very annoying. A quick restart would solve it for a short while, but the stutter would appear after a few minutes of play. Is it a memory leak? Who knows, but a performance patch would be welcome.
If you don’t mind the stutter, Locktale is a fascinating cryptography title. The mental gymnastics are varied, clever, and rewarding to jump through. Whilst my brain needed some support with the flexible difficulty levels to find all the answers, I still felt incredibly accomplished to solve. Enjoyable!
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