Ah, I see. Since the player character was immediately like “OK, I know what to do with this,” I assumed it’d be solvable by the player and the commands were just a shortcut
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Well, I think you’d need the specific wheel, which is one advantage the PC has over the player – I don’t think there’s a way to see exactly how it’s laid out in-game, right?
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We assumed the method would immediately become obvious after using DECIPHER, but it sounds like that’s not the case after all — that’s really good to know!
It would probably be way too hard for us to solve with the information we currently have, so unless we hit some sort of miraculous breakthrough very soon, I think we’ll just use the intended in-game method and return to the text afterwards for further investigation like Josh has been doing (though we’re not holding our breath for any more discoveries).
We figured it must be this type, but I’m wondering now if we might be using a modified version in-game! My guess though is that the hardware is the same, but the PC has somehow figured out what algorithm to apply to it.
It’s been a pleasure discussing ciphers with all of you!
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I’m almost positive that the wheel has the alphabets arranged with the consonants and the vowels separated, so BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZAEIOU, but then there’s some modifying factor on top of that.
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…oh. I may have been missing the obvious. If I think that the alphabet is in a different order, then the table needs to be in that order too, or the rotations won’t make sense. Hang on…
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Yup. Gah. Can’t believe it took me so long to see that that was the scrambling that was confusing me. And yeah, under these circumstances it’s certainly reasonable for the protagonist to be able to decipher it easily with the wheel.
OK, so @Ally or anybody else who’s trying to solve this, the alphabet on the cipher wheel is AEIOUBCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ, and the letter is describing (this is a pretty generous hint, I think?) something that happens in the game, so think about people and place names and then the cipher is, yeah, just a Vigenère cipher. I think with those hints it’s probably solvable.
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Ah, that’s actually a clever way to do it – once I realized that the alphabet was going to be out of order on the wheel, I just threw up my hands, but just moving out the vowels is enough to make it trickier to solve while still being simple enough to be a plausible 19th-century method. Congrats on cracking it!
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You’ve pretty much nailed it down. I’ll hold off on my fuller explanation until after the comp, unless there are unanswered questions above that I’ve overlooked.
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Since there’s no review thread for this game, I’ll post my review here. admins feel free to move it to another thread if that’s a better idea.
What I like the most about Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe are the present day and far past scenes. What I like the less is the prose. These two statements seem unrelated but they have the same explanation.
The explanation lies in the classical “a narrative at war with a crossword” description of IF. The present day and far past scenes of the game belong, with one exception (see below), to a kind of narrative framework devoid of puzzles. They are dramatic and characterful, and they use interaction in ways that make them more interesting.
(The exception is the sixth floor sequence. I think it’s probably the best in the game. It’s dramatic and it’s also a decent puzzle.)
On the other hand, most scenes in the past (with, perhaps, the exception of your first visit to the hospital) are scarcely dramatic. They are exposition bits for the puzzles, in the classic prose style of puzzly IF: very concise and, perhaps, a bit too dry. And the puzzles they lead to? Here’s the problem: those puzzles are not bad, they are not always obvious and they are perfectly logical within their settings, but they aren’t memorable either, there’s no a-ha revelatory moment. They are not bad! I’d be proud to design puzzles like those, but if I made them, I’d surround them with more flavourful prose and more drama, because I wouldn’t think they are enough. The kind of drama the present day sections have.
The game is very smooth and it helps the player in small and smart ways (like short travel through rooms inside buildings that are no longer of interest). This is a polished, very well made and nice to play game.
All in all, an engaging, fun game with some great scenes and a good backstory, whose puzzle sections feel, to me, too long for their rewards.
Note: I obtained 12 clues. I didn’t put together all the pieces of the story, I guess because of those missing clues.
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Thanks for the review!
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