Codebreaker Puzzle 1000! ENG & JAN

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Codebreaker Puzzle, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, is as the title indicates, a Puzzle game about solving coded puzzles in the shape of crossword puzzles. And also as the title indicates, this game has puzzles in both English and Japanese languages, with 1000 puzzles in each language.

I won’t be reviewing the Japanese-language portion of the game, as I cannot read Japanese, and this game is not designed to be any sort of teaching tool to help people learn the language. However, you needn’t know Japanese to play the game’s 1000 English-language puzzles, and the menus are in English, so for most players it’s best to see the Japanese puzzles as an extra-nice bilingual bonus for those who know both languages, and I would expect those puzzles to work in a similar manner to the English-language ones.

In each of this game’s puzzles, players are presented with a partly-filled crossword puzzle, with blank spaces marked with numbers. Each number is associated with a specific letter, and the letters the puzzle uses are highlighted on the left side of the screen, so all the player needs to do is assign each letter to the correct number to solve the puzzle.

To do so, players will have to use context and a bit of common sense to piece everything together. Seeing B 5 Y might mean that 5 is “o” (to spell “boy”) but it could also be “u” (“buy”). Are both letters highlighted? If so, where else are they used in the puzzle? If you see elsewhere that a word contains 5 and 5 right next to each other, that pretty much tells you the letter is “o”, because it is exceptionally rare to see two “u”s together (though it is technically possible, in words such as “continuum” and “vacuum”).

Did your eyes gloss over at that last paragraph? If so, then this game probably isn’t for you. However, if you enjoy solving these sorts of puzzles, then Codebreaker Puzzle has a lot to offer you, starting with extremely easy puzzles a young child could figure out, all the way to challenging puzzles that you’ll have to take a moment to think through. 1000 puzzles does cover a lot of ground, after all.

The presentation here is simple, using clean, easily-legible text and flat colors that work well enough for the game but are hardly eye-catching. This is backed by some pretty annoying repetitive music that will soon see you changing the settings to silence the music, or just outright muting the game.

Apart from this complaint about the music, I do have a few other issues. I wish this game let you “test-mark” squares you’re unsure about much as you can do in the better Sudoku games. I’m also disappointed at the lack of touchscreen support, which would fit this game very well and make up for the somewhat clunky gamepad controls. The $9.50 price seems a bit high, though this is mitigated by regular sales. And while the puzzles offered do range quite a bit in difficulty, I feel like they overall tend to be a bit too much on the easy side.

However, while there’s certainly room here for improvement, I think that players who enjoy word puzzles will be delightfully pleased with Codebreaker Puzzle. This game has a huge amount of content (even more so if you can read Japanese as well as English), fairly unique gameplay, and simple rules that are still fun and challenging. This is a worthwhile addition to the Nintendo Switch’s Puzzle game library.

tl;dr – Codebreaker Puzzle is a Puzzle game where players try to find which letter corresponds to numbers spread throughout a Crossword-style Puzzle. With 1000 English-language puzzles to solve and simple but compelling gameplay, this game has a lot to offer fans of word puzzles, and there’s twice the content for players who can read Japanese and play Japanese-language puzzles. There are multiple areas where this game could be improved, but overall this is a pretty good Puzzle game.

Grade: B-

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