Sage Sanctum Scramble by Arthur DiBianca
Sage Sanctum Scramble is a series of language, letter and wordplay puzzles connected by only the loosest of narratives. Where earlier Arthur DiBianca games like The Temple of Shorgil were essentially attempts to delve incredibly deeply into a single puzzle mechanic, Sage Sanctum Scramble is more a collection of every puzzle mechanic that DiBianca could think of that was even vaguely related to language. Sometimes, you have to come up with words that fit a particular semantic and syntactic category: flowers that are 5 letters long. Sometimes, you have to study how words are transformed using more or less complicated alphabet cyphers. Sometimes, you have to engage in wordplay.
It’s all implemented very well, and the puzzles are fun. To be sure, some are a little hard for a non-native speaker like myself (I sure spent a lot of time with anagram solvers, synonyms websites and general google searches), but that is hardly DiBianca’s fault, and I enjoyed the opportunity to improve my skills. (Did you know that there are actually two plural fruit that can be formed from SALMON by substituting one letter and then rearranging them? I was proud of my MANGOS, but alas, I needed MELONS.)
Being a loose collection of vaguely related puzzles does mean that it’s all a little inconsequential, of course. Good fun, but not something that will stick with me as much as the authors previous games.