Locktale

Description

Step into a cozy tale where words love to play hide-and-seek!

Locktale is a no-pressure, story-driven puzzle game that invites you to decode secret messages using ciphers, symbols, visual tricks, and (more or less...) gentle logic challenges. Each level uses a new unique encoding technique for you to understand and crack - so take your time, experiment, and enjoy uncovering a story that slowly reveals itself, one decoded message at a time :)

Adaptive difficulty

Even if some ciphers are pretty advanced, I wanted to make this game accessible to anyone who's curious about ciphers, no matter how new you are to the domain - that's why every level has three levels of hints, from "minimal" to "detailed", that will give you different clues to decipher the message.

A wide range of ciphers

In Locktale, each level presents you with a new challenge - no two puzzles use the same trick! Throughout the 50+ levels, you'll thus get to learn about a bunch of common ciphers, from basic ones used during the Antiquity up to the tools of modern cryptography. (Oh, and there are also some techniques or symbol-based ciphers I invented just for this game!)

Stay meta

All the puzzles are meant to be solvable using only the info in the game, no need to go and scour the net for cryptography databases... but that doesn't mean all the info will be easy to find! Some levels will require you to go back to previously solved puzzles to find extra keys and data; others will ask you to study the given hints or change the game's UI theme to gather more clues; others yet will build on methods you've already discovered to create even more complex ciphers.