Sorry, James
Tales from decrypt
DEVELOPER KONSTRUCTORS • P UBLISHER KONSTRUCTORS • P RICE US$ 5 • A VAILABLE AT STEAM konstructors.com
The first thing Sorry, James asks of you is to enter a username and password. To clarify, it’s not asking you to create a username and password, but to enter a specific username and password. No immediate clues are offered as to what you should type in the flickering monochrome CRT field. If you’re like me you’ll try a few things at random before scratching your head and wondering if you missed something vital. A few minutes later, after double-checking the game’s Steam page to make sure you’re not going mad, you’ll crack it. The login, that is.
It’s an unusual way to begin a game, throwing the player into the pool and trusting they’ll figure out how to swim. Yet it sets the scene for a game that’s all about making intuitive leaps across the gaps between seemingly discrete pieces of information.
You play a Cold War era security engineer named James Garner, which is either a baffling nod to the late Maverick and The Rockford Files star or merely a suitably American name the Russian developers just happened to like. After logging in to your ‘80s computer you’re instructed by your colleague to decrypt a batch of files. Finish the first batch and she’ll send you another. Just remember your job is only to decrypt them, she says, not to open them.
Decrypting a file introduces the primary puzzle mechanic. Each node on a grid can be assigned either a white cell or a black cell. Initially a few cells are already assigned white or black and the number written in the cell tells you how many like-coloured cells link to it. So, for example, a white cell with a “4” in it means four linked cells must also be white. It sounds simple, but like Minesweeper or Sudoku (two puzzles the developers cite as influences) there’s a delicate balance found between rote process of elimination and logical reasoning.
It also gets more complex as more elements are introduced, all of which manage to increase the challenge while neither feeling artificially difficult nor detracting from the elegance of the core mechanics. Sometimes there are links missing between nodes, or they’re missing and you can also rotate the links to connect to different nodes. Soon, what might initially have posited only a few possible combinations of linked cells for you to consider now require you to contemplate what can feel like an endless supply of possibilities. While I breezed through early puzzles in mere minutes, many of the later ones had me running into logical dead-ends and restarting over and over again.
Once you’ve assigned all the relevant cells in a file, it decrypts and you can move on to the next one. Or perhaps you might be tempted to open it, disobeying your orders. I won’t spoil what happens if you do start opening the files, but suffice to say you’ll quickly find yourself mulling over a very different kind of puzzle, something rather more metaphysical and, ultimately, tantalisingly opaque.
after logging in to your ‘80s computer you’re instructed to decrypt a batch of files