Prose & Codes vs Vaporum: Lockdown
Prose & Codes
Prose & Codes is a fun and fairly relaxing puzzle game where you’ll need to solve simple substitution ciphers involving excerpts from both popular and obscure literary classics that are listed as “public domain” while being serenaded by beautiful piano music. The game features book excerpts from 7 different genres, ranging from children’s stories to tales of epic adventures; several difficulty levels to choose from, and if you like what you’ve deciphered, you can even hop on over to the online library that is Project Gutenberg since all these books are available to read and download for free.Even if you’re not a whiz at solving ciphers, Prose & Codes will have you hooked from start to finish! The levels are very well designed and tailored to the difficulty setting of your choice, and the excerpts are all very well-selected. If you’re a book lover, not only can you have fun decoding the ciphers and bookmarking the excerpts that you love most; you can also take this opportunity to discover new titles that you might be interested to read.
Finding the corresponding book is easy as pie too since the game provides you with a nifty button that will direct you over to Project Gutenberg where you can download and read the books (in eBook form) for free.
Vaporum: Lockdown
Vaporum: Lockdown is a first-person, dungeon crawler featuring old-school grid-based dungeon-crawling gameplay with real-time combat, fun Sokoban-like puzzles, cool steampunk-themed setting, and an intriguing mystery to uncover. In this game, you play as a scientist, Ellie, who’s trapped within a locked-down facility called the Arx Vaporum filled with murderous robots and mutated creatures. Will Ellie be able to escape the place in one piece? What will she discover as she makes her way through Arx Vaporum?In terms of gameplay, you’ll be moving Ellie, the protagonist of the story, one grid at a time. Turning to face a certain direction before you can say turn a corner also requires an extra tap of the keyboard. However, this also means that you can actually move like a crab in this game if you’re sure of the path you’re on. Like most dungeon crawlers, Vaporum: Lockdown comes with devious traps, enemies and puzzles. Traps in this game can be rather easily avoided as long as you got the timing down right.
The interesting part about this game is that combat plays out in real-time here, unlike any other old-school dungeon crawlers we have experienced before. This means that it is entirely possible to loop a sequence of “move and attack” when facing something stationary so you can avoid getting hit at all. However, this also means that more mobile enemies can be trickier to slay – it all boils down to timing really.
There are also fun Sokoban-like puzzles in this game. Most of them involve having you to move crates around to fill holes in the ground, block danger from the path you want to take, or even to serve as paperweights on metal pressure plates. For hardcore treasure seekers, the game even has several hidden compartments that an inquisitive explorer might be able to find, each of these alcoves usually come with some nice rewards. There is a sufficient variety of loot, and you can get better gear as you progress.
Being a prequel of the highly-successful Vaporum, Vaporum: Lockdown definitely does the original game, and the Vaporum universe as a while, proud. Besides the few new features here and there, the gameplay is generally similar to the original title and hence, would be instantly familiar to fans of Vaporum. The storytelling here is great as well, offering so much more lore than before, and of course, the fantastic atmosphere here will pull you right into the fumium-obsessed world that Ellie Teller lives in.