CERT by tjm, A Puzzle Adventure Book
CERT by tjm is a pdf freely available on itch.io. This is a combination puzzle and adventure game book.
The puzzles are a bit abstract and provide the key to progressing. You start with a grid with some letters and some black pieces in various shapes to overlay on the grid. The pieces have holes. Thus the remaining letters spell out a word that you look up in the 'dictionary' and it tells you what page to go to next. Like most adventure books, the story is not linear to avoid cheating. Its actually a pretty clever and easy to use system.
I liked the puzzles. The difficulty curve felt very smooth and new concepts were introduced with each puzzle. Whenever I felt like I was getting into a groove, a new concept was introduced to add a twist. Soft at first, but then explored to its fullest in subsequent puzzles. I'm someone who usually struggles with puzzles, but I feel like I really got these.
However I stopped and may have to restart. I'm a bit concerned I'll need all of the solutions for later puzzles as I just ran into an issue where a puzzle relied on a solution I didn't save down. It is brilliant design, but I wish there had been a hint of this before I started. sigh
So I recommend this if the idea intrigues you, but save your answers somewhere!
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