Cluegon: The Wonter Legacy (Dimitris Chassapakis) // Review

Cluegon: The Wonter Legacy is the latest puzzle book from the creator of Journal 29, Dimitris Chassapakis:

“Julian Wonter disappeared without a trace, leaving behind a complex and mysterious apparatus hidden within the long-abandoned Wonter Factory. Your mission is to uncover the secrets he left behind using the cryptic puzzles and clues in this book. With every puzzle you solve, you’ll get one step closer to revealing Wonter’s greatest secret.”

What you need: A pencil and an internet-connected device.

First impressions

It has become a bit of a tradition to take puzzle books away with me on my travels. The fact that you just need a pencil and a phone for most of them, makes them easy to travel with. Much to my excitement, Cluegon: The Wonter Legacy was released just days before I was due to fly to Fuerteventura. I couldn’t open Amazon fast enough to place my order, which arrived just before I left! I’d previously enjoyed Dimitris’ puzzle book trilogy Journal 29 and the standalone puzzle book The Cypher Files, so was eager to see what he had up his sleeve next.

I love the aesthetic of the book, which isn’t wildly different from Journal 29. The cover shows off a big question mark in a technical drawing style. Mysterious monochrome images are spread out throughout the pages, each conveying elements of the warehouse while also hiding secrets. The whole book looks cohesive in style and is well put together.

If you are looking for a rich narrative and lots of compelling prose, this likely isn’t the puzzle book for you. Aside from a letter from Julian Wonter at the start and a video at the end, there isn’t much in the way of a story. It didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the book at all, but I did want to put it out in case it is important to you.

Gameplay

How it works

If you’ve played a Dimitris Chassapakis puzzle book before, you’ll be familiar with how they work. Each double-page spread includes a puzzle on one page and a QR code on the other. To progress, you must solve the puzzle, scan the QR code and submit your answer. If correct, you are given a keyword to note down on the page and these keywords form parts of future puzzles. If incorrect, it’s back to the drawing board!

Cluegon broadly follows this format, however, it adds some additional elements. The main difference is the addition of a dot-to-dot mechanic, where you must connect the correct dots based on their letters. Working out which letters to connect is the tricky part, as you’ll need to interpret the ‘clue’ image into keywords. These keywords are translated into upper and lower case based on the values in the black squares (A or a). Once you’ve connected all the dots correctly you will reveal an image, word or number that will help you answer the ‘final level question’. Then it’s just a case of scanning the QR code and entering the answer. It took me a few moments to get my head around the new setup, but there is a step-by-step guide at the start of the book which explains this well.

One pitfall of the dot-to-dot mechanic is that sometimes the answers became clear simply because I could see words among the dots. The use of case sensitivity somewhat counteracts this by allowing the same letter to feature twice, so it wasn’t as if this happened on every page.

Puzzles

The book includes 24 puzzles of varying styles and difficulties. For the most part, I didn’t find them too taxing, however, some did take a bit longer to solve. You may need to manipulate the book at certain points and some puzzles may require that you think outside the book a little. There is also a “memories” section that holds some key information, which I ironically forgot about. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled, as I did manage to unlock one easter egg during my playthrough. I’m unsure if there are any more, but I will keep looking…

A few of the puzzles do require you to visit a website to solve them. These pages normally contain some sort of interactive element to use alongside the ‘clue’ image in the book. I believe there are only three of these, so the internet usage isn’t excessive, but it does help keep the gameplay fresh.

Overall the book felt shorter than previous outings, but appreciate that there would be a longer wait in between entries if the books were bigger. In some puzzle books, you can solve puzzles out of sequence. For this one, you can jump around a bit, although I try to work through it in order as much as possible.

Hints & Difficulty

The hint pages take up nearly half of the book. I could forgive this if it was to make gameplay completely analogue, but you have to scan QR codes to progress, which requires the internet. The pages do include some cool imagery, but it felt like the hint pages could have been streamlined as there was a lot of blank space.

Aside from the hints in the book, there is a QR code on each hint page that offers to give you more hints. When I tried to use this, I discovered that it just gave the actual keyword answers rather than additional hints, so beware if you don’t just want the answers. For more granular hints, there is an online forum where users help each other to progress through the book.

Verdict

About Dimitris Chassapakis