Codex Crusade

Played: 7/9/24
Playtime: 45min, two restarts due to bugs

I was immediately won over by the sly, subversive wit that permeates the piece. It is nominally modern, but also medieval, and slides across its academia/occult knowledge/farce vibes with confidence and panache, dropping academic treatises and pop culture references with equal weight. It’s a quest for a portentious tome in the bowels of a library you are interning at. You need to make porridge, as is usually required in these things. There’s fights, snotty students, amusingly off-kilter puzzles. Two quick samples that I snorted in delight at: “[RE granola]The loudest, crumbiest of all the snacks.” “the medieval peasant you keep in your head for dialectical purposes cackles at you,”

It’s also, unfortunately, intrusively buggy in one of its central puzzles. In one early section, you are asked to concoct something. If you explore out of order, you can find yourself carrying the wrong ingredients for your puzzle solving mixture, with no way to replace incorrect items. In the course of decoding its mild complexity, I twice found myself in endless loops, unable to click free and needed to restart. This early in the game, not a huge problem but certainly jarring and unwelcome. If appearing in a longer work, would be game ending.

Even when not outright blocked, I was sometimes treated to buggy text as well, the following appearing after a paragraph of normal text:
"(set: the recipe card,jerky to it - jerky
what I can only presume to be internal code.

So yeah, a flawed experience, but honestly the rest of it is so witty and good-natured it was easy enough to forgive. The graphical presentation is pleasing, the use of sound amusing and deftly employed. A little more polish and it would be an unambiguous recommend. Will keep my eye out for promised subsequent chapters.