Faraday Protocol is a first-person puzzle game that tests your wits and intelligence, challenging your critical thinking. You are Raug Zeekon: interstellar archeologist from planet Cunor. You have been sent by your company to investigate the source of a mysterious signal coming from an unexplored star. The Bia Tool, an ancient relic of an alien civilization, is the first mystery you uncover when arriving in OPIS. Unsure of its true purpose you start wielding it to solve the challenges on your path. With its ability to absorb energy and the option to redistribute it to different machinery, you start digging deeper and deeper into the temples, encountering even harder puzzles that will test your savvy and abilities in problem solving...

This is a puzzle game that slowly ramps up the difficulty

Faraday Protocol is a puzzle game that slowly ramps up the difficulty. When you start, the puzzles seem simple enough. A little challenging, but certainly nothing to tax you too heavily.

And this is how the game cleverly draws you in. This is a game that just eats time. I sat down for a quick blast and several hours later I was: "Just a few more minutes..." And when I was forced to switch it off, my mind was constantly wandering back to it. It was the last thing I did at night and the first thing I thought of when I woke in the morning.

Are you smart enough to solve every challenge thrown at you? You encounter a mysterious robotic voice. Her name is IRIS, an A.I. created to guard the ancient structures of OPIS. The complex seems to have been abandoned for aeons, but what was its purpose? Rooms filled with puzzles, getting more and more sophisticated and challenging as you progress through them. Who built them? Why would someone build a training facility like this on an otherwise abandoned planet? The answers await you... If you're smart enough.

The environments look like a nightclub has been kitted out with black light UV ambiance and ancient Egyptian architecture. It works well to add atmosphere.

Explore the strange alien environments

Inevitably you're going to get to that part that no matter how many times you try, no matter how many combinations you attempt, you can't get passed a puzzle. When you eventually admit defeat and head to the Internet to search for a walkthrough video, you'll discover that the answer was staring you in the face all the time.

You start the game with a "weapon" (a Bia Tool) which is actually used to transfer energy from one area to another. Simply find an energy point, suck out the juice and then shoot it out at another empty energy point to activate switches, open doors and numerous other actions that are powered by this alien technology.

There's nothing like completing one puzzle and to finally progress to the next... But as you step up to a new puzzle it feels like a mammoth task that you'll never complete. There's constantly new elements thrust before you and a lot of the puzzle solving will revolve around a combination of trial and error, as well as using elements from previous puzzles which you solved. A well conceived and challenging game.

8

Nick Smithson