Decipherism

About the game

Decipherism is a puzzle about codes. Each level gives you a cipher machine: a short pipeline of blocks, drawn on a green screen, that takes a word at one end and hands you a scrambled one at the other. Beside the screen is a short list of encoded keywords. Somewhere there are plain words that the machine turns into exactly those strings, and your job is to find them.

You can type anything you like into the machine and watch what comes out, so every level is a small experiment. One block shifts every letter along the alphabet, another reverses the word, another swaps its halves, and later ones only act on some of the letters or choose a path depending on the text. Run a few words, see which letters moved and where, work out what each block is doing and then run it backwards in your head. When you type the right word, the matching keyword lights up.

The game was made in a month for Game Off 2022, a game jam whose theme was "cliche". The theme explains the look: you are "hacking" a secret using a retro device with bright green consoles, sticky notes on the desk and a paper manual. The manual is part of the game, with a page for each new kind of block. Many levels can be solved more than one way, and some have a secret keyword hidden on top of the ones the screen asks for.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait for the page to load (about 16 MB, downloaded only when you press the button). Pick "Get back to work" in the first menu, choose a block on the map and then a component, and you are in front of the machine. Type a word on the keyboard and press Enter to run it.

The game saves your progress in this browser (the levels you finished and your options). Clearing the site data erases it. It makes no requests outside this site. A keyboard is needed, and the game is meant for a large screen: it is drawn at 1920x1080 and scales to the size of the window.

Controls

Some browsers keep a few Ctrl shortcuts for themselves; if one does not work, the same actions are also on the screen. The manual in the game lists the rest, including a few hidden keybinds.

Tips

Start with letters in a row. Typing "abc" or "aaaa" makes it easy to see what every block does to each position.

Change one letter at a time. If a block acts only on some positions, one changed letter shows which.

Read the manual. It explains every new block the first time it shows up, and the hint stickers on the screen point at what to try.

Use the speed knob and pause. Slow the signal down, pause it and watch the value between blocks to catch what each one does.

FAQ

Is it hard? The first levels teach you the basics, and the difficulty grows with new kinds of blocks. You can always come back to the manual or to a level you already solved.

Can I get stuck? Levels are independent steps on a map, so you can try another one and come back later.

Does it work on a phone? No: you have to type, and the game is built for a keyboard and a mouse.

Why do the letters look different from the original? The fonts of the green display and of the handwritten notes were swapped for VT323 and Handlee (open fonts), because the originals had no clear terms for redistribution. Nothing else changed.

Credits and licence

Decipherism was made by Alex Sharipov (quasilyte) with Ebitengine and his own ge library. The game is under the MIT licence, and the Go libraries it uses are under MIT, Apache 2.0 and BSD licences, all listed in the licence file linked from this page.

• Music: "Kalte Ohren" (ft. starfrosch & Jerry Spoon), (c) 2019, and "Drive" (ft. cdk & Darryl J), (c) 2013, both by Alex (Alex Beroza), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Sources: Kalte Ohren and Drive on ccMixter. Used unchanged.
• Fonts: Sector 017 by Neoqueto (2009, CC BY-SA 3.0); VT323, Copyright 2011 The VT323 Project Authors, and Handlee, Copyright 2011 Joe Prince, Vissol Ltd. (both SIL Open Font License 1.1).
• Sound effects: generated with sfxr.

The licence texts and the source of this build, with the one patch we applied (the font changes), are linked from this page.