Codex Crusade

Codex Crusade has the kind of premise where if you explain it to someone else, they’d check the back of your skull to see if you’d suffered a head injury – and I mean that in the best possible way. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you’re a library intern at the University of Turin (Georgia, not Italy), where the geographical confusion adverted to in that parenthetical has led to a collector of arcane lore to leave a treasure trove of books to your otherwise-agronomy-focused archive, which in turn prompts a mysterious woman to charge you with entering the stacks to find a mysterious tome that contains all other books within it, offering you access to all the world’s knowledge if you succeed, delivered in the shape of a cat that answers to “the Akashic record” (you can pet the cat) (okay, having typed all that out, after checking for head trauma they might also just ask if you’d been playing a bunch of Mage: the Ascension).

This off-kilter mix of scholarly references and giddy humor continues once you get through the intro and enter the game proper, which presents you with the first of what will presumably be many challenges in your quest (the game only offers this teaser, but says there’ll be sequels to come). Your task is to navigate through a sort of cross-dimensional cafeteria to reach an elevator to the deeper levels; standing in your way is the elevator security system, which requires a keycard to bypass, and the elevator security guard, who isn’t going to let you by even with said keycard (his first name is Jorge, and I’d eat my hat if his second name isn’t Luis). There isn’t a lot of incidental scenery to take in before puzzle-solving imperatives take over, but what’s there is is fun, like this dialogue from some pretentious scholars:

“Maybe if you read Heidegger, you’d understand why your pedestrian takes on morality aren’t useful!”

“Yikes! Have you considered that if your source is a Nazi, you’re on the wrong team?”

“Well, I think you’ve both missed a big point. Have either of you read House of Leaves…?”

And in trying to wake up a dozing diner, you can shake him and say “hey”, “wake up”, “fire!”, or “hey look there’s Pedro Pascal.” Sure, to a degree these are empty references, but a) they’re funny, and b) given the setting and premise, empty references seem entirely on point. It’s true that I did find the very end of this installment of the game teetered a bit too close to the edge of absurdity, but for the most part Codex Crusade walks a fine line between silliness and profundity.

The puzzles are also engagingly off-beat, though one ill-advised interface decision made the game’s central challenge much more frustrating than I think was intended. You see, through a set of circumstances that don’t fully make sense, you need to follow a half-completed recipe (that you find in the Canterbury Tales!) for posset, a medieval medicinal drink, using only the ingredients you can scrounge up from the criteria. That means raiding the drink area for a choice of two beverages, and the snack bar for a bit of food, which you can then combine as best you see fit. When mixing the beverages, the interface is a conventional choice-based one – you say you want to start preparing the drink, then a pop-up asks you which liquid you want to add first from a multiple-choice list, followed by another prompt that allows you to add a second. But then it prompts to ask you if you want to add a third ingredient, at which point you need to write something into a text bar (and then click the forward link, just hitting enter doesn’t work).

The recipe is especially cryptic, so I ran through a whole bunch of different choices for things I could put in, since the game doesn’t give any indication whether what you type in is being recognized. I tried putting in the seitan-jerky snack I’d picked up just for the heck of it, before shifting to cinnamon, ginger, and lemon, which are the most common additional ingredients in posset from the recipes I found online (there’s also a set of clues you can find by rifling through one of another student’s books, which point in the same direction). Finally after fifteen minutes I checked out the source code to discover what I was missing: turns out you’re just supposed to write in the name of the snack you want to try. I was intensely frustrated by this design choice, since it would have been far simpler and intuitive – not to mention in line with how the beverage-choosing interface works – to just select an inventory item from a list, rather than go with a free-input parser box. The particular solution also doesn’t make much sense on its own terms, either (Spoiler - click to show)(if the key additional ingredient is breadcrumbs, why should you put in oatmeal, rather than wheat-based seitan?)

Brute-forcing my way through this puzzle dimmed my excitement momentarily, and while I’m grousing a bit I’ll say that I thought the two “battles” that wrapped up this section of the story were a bit repetitive. But given the scale of the creativity on offer in Codex Crusade, I’d still gladly sign up to play the next instalment – it tickles a lot of my areas of especial interest, and when it’s on, it’s very on. Just no more parser interfaces where they’re not needed next time, please!