Moss Meets Intelligent Qube In This Puzzle Platformer

Neon Cipher is a brisk, brain-teasing puzzle platformer that blends first-person immersion with third-person platforming.

Your journey begins after being dropped into a series of fraught cyberspace mazes full of robotic sentries and geometric obstacles to fight, evade, and escape. You control an avatar in the game space and manipulate the environment and its enemies using hands-on controls from a first-person perspective.

It’s a stylish and ultra-minimalist mashup of the VR classic Moss, and ancient PlayStation relics like Intelligent Qube and Echochrome.

The plot of Neon Cipher is light, and what’s here isn’t groundbreaking, but it sets the tone and establishes the game world. You play as a hacker who’s been recruited by the mysterious Captain S. Ren, a member of a digital rebellion. The goal is to hack into XE_Corp’s digital archive to retrieve… something. I can’t really recall, because the plot is so sparse that it’s simply not very memorable. On the flipside, it’s not distracting, either.

More important are the game’s mechanics, which are simple and effective. Across fifty brief puzzle stages, the player must navigate their in-game avatar through the many three-dimensional geometric mazes to obtain a set number of keys scattered throughout the environment. The avatar is controlled via the game controller’s analog sticks and buttons in a traditional third-person fashion.

The acquisition of the keys is not a straightforward proposition. Often, they are placed in awkward locations which must be navigated to with pinpoint accurate platforming and by manipulating platforms and objects in the environment. You do this with the game controller by physically reaching out, grabbing hold of the platform or object, and dragging it where we want it to go.

The manipulable objects are rendered in the monochrome game space in shades of blue and red. We can pull or push blue platforms out of niches in a wall, for instance, to create a makeshift stairway or carry our avatar here and there. Reaching out and grabbing hold of these platforms can be done with either hand, and the process feels intuitive and effortless.

Automated moving red platforms and other objects can be activated by hand switches or by placing weighted blocks placed on pressure switches.

While both mechanics work well enough, they can occasionally feel too obvious. For example, most of the blue movable platforms simply run on a predetermined track. We can slide a block left or right or up or down, but not wherever we like. This limitation keeps the player from just grabbing a block, placing our avatar onto it, and zipping them around the game world freely. Still, the fact that each block has a sort of predestined path means that the solution to every puzzle is simply sliding some blocks this way and then that. In this way, the platforming puzzles don’t always feel like puzzles, more like a series of tasks to complete.

The game’s puzzles naturally become more complicated as the game progresses, with later stages being absolutely packed with red and blue interactable puzzle objects and plenty of enemies to stun, dodge, and attack. But Neon Cipher could be a bit more challenging, and I wouldn’t complain.

Neon Cipher’s controls are tight, and the platforming is satisfying and consistent. We don’t suffer inscrutable physics or slog through frustrating perspectives. There’s no traditional camera to control, we simply view the world in first person and move ourselves physically to gain a better view. There are also no odd distances to judge, or extraneous confusing elements, and there’s no fall damage.

Once we’ve worked our avatar through the maze and collected all the necessary keys, the stage door opens, allowing our avatar to escape the stage and move on to the next. But this is easier said than done; the keys are guarded by enemies. These enemy bots attempt to destroy the player character via melee or ranged attacks, which must be avoided or countered.

We have a few methods of counterattack available to us. The first is a simple melee attack. By pressing the A button, our little electric avatar can deliver a weak punch. Punch an enemy a few times, and it’ll dissolve permanently. We can also physically reach out with the VR controller and grab the enemy bots with a press of the trigger. This temporarily stun-locks the enemy behind a vector force field, allowing our avatar in the game world to either circumvent or attack the enemy freely. Lastly, it’s possible to use the environment’s movable objects to squish the enemy bots.

While these actions can be reasonably described as “combat,” you should not expect complexity or sophistication. Our bot has one move that’s slow and ineffective. Though the ability to reach out and stun our enemies with the controllers before delivering a couple of melee attacks sounds dynamic and interesting, the reality is that combat is far from engaging.

More often than not, clearing a stage devolves simply into wiggling around a bit, avoiding the enemy’s ranged attacks, and scampering away with a key. It’s just not very exciting, and this becomes even more obvious when we realize that defeating all the bots on a stage is not a requirement for progression. If we can evade the enemies and grab all the keys, the door opens, and we still win.

But I’m nitpicking, just a bit. What’s here is fine, I only wish the puzzles were a bit tougher on the brain, and the combat a bit more demanding of the reflexes.

Playing Neon Cipher almost becomes meditative at times. Despite the potential stress of failure and the lightly taxing mental exertion, the game’s ethereal environment and moody ambient soundtrack sneakily lulls you into a state of calm. After 20 or 40 minutes of playing, I feel more focused, somehow.

Neon Cipher uses the controller’s analog stick for moving the avatar in the game space, and the headset for first-person camera work. There is no real movement requirement, and the game can be played sitting or standing.

Beyond the main campaign of fifty puzzles, Neon Cipher also includes a fairly comprehensive level creator. Custom mazes are built using pre-made blocks and objects, which can be placed anywhere in the 3D space. While there is currently no way to upload custom maps, the developer hopes to implement this in future updates, or that maps can be shared manually via the studio’s Discord server.

Neon Cipher Review – Final Verdict

Neon Cipher began life as a school project developed across a three-month period. Upon graduation, eXomorph Games’ studio head, Jon Bogert, expanded the game to its current form for this release, and it’s an enjoyable debut from a new developer. It may not be as lush or expansive as similar third-person/first-person puzzle platformers such as Moss, but it’s a fun albeit simplified example of the genre’s more interesting ideas.

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