I PLAYED CRYPTIC NOTES SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO (NOT CLICKBAIT)
Joking aside, I mentioned once or twice I'm part of a team working on archiving all of Identity V (including the little birds with methods some may deem... unnatural). We avoid logging in to do so, barring designated scapegoats.
However, the designated scapegoats suck at Cryptic Notes and needed help. You may have guessed from my mentions of being high-rank before the boycott, my willingness to main a tie Hunter in hight tier, and my constant allusions to games like Silent Hill or Bloodborne.... I am a difficulty sicko. A freak. I like my games hard and I like them irritating.
So last week I was called in to help the designated scapegoats archive Cryptic Notes and, after a few frenzy-fueled nights of playing, acquired everything (including stickers and tags). I've been declared the Cryptic Notes Collector to either play or help collect everything for next update.
What did I think of the new game mode?
Not good.
So, Cryptic Notes.
The pitch of the game is that it's like Lethal Company or Content Warning but, after playing it, I think shovelware Resident Evil or Amnesia knockoffs are better comparisons, with the extraction element being pasted on as currency and an obligatory time limit of twelve minutes.
The map is procedurally generated with items either scattered around, with certain rooms such as the piano room, the master bedroom, and the Muse room being identifiable by their gold outlines on the maps.
The game mode is horribly unbalanced. It's very RNG-reliant: Sometimes you see the most difficult enemies once in an entire run, other times several spawn at once, but it's obscenely easy (even on hard mode with randoms) in a group and obscenely difficult single-player...
Well, it was. Then I figured out how to cheese it.
How to Cheese Cryptic Notes
As of the writing, this is what I do to cheese Cryptic Notes.
What you need:
Shotgun - deal with Sighs (balloons), Wraiths (not!Banes), and Big Dolls. Make sure to reload.
Hydra staff - deal with other enemies. Allows you to dash to dodge damage and parry ability which protects from Wraiths too.
Syringe - Heal when your ability is on cd in safe zones.
Mint - to run fast without wasting stamina, good for exploring fast
Goggles - Allows you to see in the dark for several minutes
Item of your choice (ex: Flamethrower or emergency tp book)
Healer build - gives you free heal every 60 seconds and spares you from one instance of lethal damage
What to do: After making sure all your items set up, run outside and go towards the wall to your left. There should be some rubble that allows you to climb up to a wall leading to a 2nd floor door. Go through this door and turn on your night vision goggles.
From here, go run around the 2nd floor looking for two things: Locked Boxes (represented by a purple/gold vault icon) and locked wooden boxes. Collect as many purple and, more importantly, gold items you can get until you are either full (go back to lobby to deliver items then rush out) or fill your quota of 80000. Kill everything except baby dolls and pale men (axe guys reading) on sight. But if they turn hostile immediately pump them full of lead or set them on fire.
Rooms that you should keep an eye out for are master bedrooms, ballrooms, and Muse music box rooms. These almost 100% have a guaranteed A or S box in them. However they're most likely to spawn strong monsters like Wraiths so be prepared.
If you find a Muse room with the music box, make sure to deliver the music box LAST because to open the treasure room (has 4 guaranteed A/S vaults). it must be opened with the music box.
The best part about this is the profit: In hard mode, you can get 700 logic points per run, regardless of if you live or die, so you can get more logic points from Cryptic Notes than most QM, Causal Modes, or Ranked.
You can get 10000 logic points in about an hour, so you can max the logic path in about 4 hours, not all of which have to be done at once.
If you are not boycotting or soft boycotting (f2p), congrats, enjoy your new way to cheese the logic path. Bathe in your wealth.
I don't want to touch the mode until I'm called back to my personal hell.
The Lore
I'll separate this into a future post, but the lore is, as I have complained about with Cage of Yesteryear, more interested in 1. Explaining the Winston (Oletus) Manor lore for people who weren't paying attention and 2. Drumming up questions that probably won't be explained satisfactory. It's bad.
The general idea is an alternate universe where Orpheus seemingly didn't exist, so, as a result, all three Winstons (including Alice) died in the Massacre, with the protagonist being a new part of raiders breaking into the decrepit Manor, only to learn something spoooooky is going on.
The Codex Entries were missing until the 25th. For a mode they hyped up since May, it's telling to me they couldn't even prepare smaller entries before the release date. The developmental pipeline is fucked.
The Entries themselves hype tidbits about Arthur Winston/Dennis having conducted deals in the Mediterranean before. More disappointingly, it implies Jules Winston/Alice DeRoss is special and chosen by Winston/Oletus Manor in some form and that's why she was called the Cursed Girl, not because of misogyny and unfortunate circumstances. Everyone in Winston/Oletus is trapped during the night of the Massacre, which is definitely 100% what people asking for more information about the Dreamlands wanted. Arthur Winston was being compelled by the Manor to try and murder his wife and daughter, which was part of his erratic actions before the bandits murdered him.
Oh and no explanation for the little boy in the family portrait. The portrait in the text only has three people. Maybe they'll reveal there's a secret second son everyone forgot but I am tired of Moffatian bullshit.
The one interesting thing that came from any of this is that the protagonist, who is part of a second group of raiders and looks suspiciously like Orpheus, has a daughter he's trying to afford medication for, which provides some insight as to how Memory developed. That's it. Out of thousands of words that's it.
I am well-aware there are two more parts for Bringer of Doom waiting to be added, with more lore and more enemies. Including Miss Nightingale. I still think the same.
The Gacha
It's technically free but the gacha in Cryptic Notes is filled with dark mechanics to try and make you play more.
First, there's two gachas. The first gacha is made from the ink currency you get from selling items you retrieve in the mode. You get one free pull a day, with each pull giving some blueprints as pity, which can be exchanged for items in the shop. So, by both selling and waiting for free daily, it's incredibly easy to get all the items. Not too bad.
But then there's the weapon reskin gacha. After pulling the weapon from the first gacha, you now exchange the ink and the feathers you can collect in the game mode to roll a dice to reskin each part of the weapon. There are five different parts and you can lock four so they don't change between rolls, but you have to roll in order to unlock the other parts. So, if I wanted to, say, get the rare sword design (based off The Divine Comedy) I would have to roll several times praying I get the handle, the hilt, the blade, the color, and the trait correct. I burned through all of feathers I had collected in the mad days of quest completion trying to get the rare item alone and, therefore, decided it was not feasible to archive the other swords. It's bad.
You can see how predatory this is to try and guarantee people continue playing Cryptic Notes to get the sword they want.
Is It Worth It?
I say this with a lot of passion, as someone who has played dozens of horror games, including extraction, survival, and asymmetric horror, and I say this as a fan of IDV since 2018.
Cryptic Notes was a mistake.
Yes, the mode will be patched, yes the mode will have expansions, yes there will be even other books. I know all of this and my opinion will not shift.
First off, let's look at the resources invested in every single Cryptic Notes season: A book with an entire story split over three chapters; three lore entries for each of the monsters, classics, and other significant items; a procedurally generating map with additions per chapter update; multiple monsters with several stronger variants; and a final boss.
All of that without an indication that the production pipeline of the rest of the game are slowing down: the annual story update, Christmas, both anniversary events, Halloween, Summer, several characters a year are still happening in spite initial suggestions otherwise.
This mass production is unsustainable without costs to either your team or implementation of low quality Hail Marys like Gen AI. We are already seeing the consequences of this with issues like the Fatty Wang Skin Plagiarism.
"But the seasons are several months long!" I know, and it's still not enough.
Because we also don't know the internal structure of Joker Studios, which already is split between Sea of Remnants and IDV, we don't know how many resources are now permanently redistributed towards Cryptic Notes. Imagine if these resources were distributed towards something else, such as biannual story updates, or IDENTITY Swaps.
But that's not what people want. People want skins for their faves and, when push comes to shove, characters like Memory are going to be given more lore, more love, more quality than characters who are trapped in limbo like Arthur Byers. The CN Server has speculated on some of the Essences that will be chosen and based off the names, it's for stories like Lily, Alva, and Melly. The only unpopular character I suspect could be chosen is Efron, due to Field of Reeds possibly referencing the Egyptian afterlife. Not exactly a Jeffrey or Jose-based Essence.
The Lore, too, represents a downgrade I have feared since Cage of Yesteryear. It's spoon-fed, it reduces tragedies from terrible miracles to something spoooOoooky, and it doesn't trust you to like Alice enough on characterization that it has to implement special powers for her. Oh and the doll implies that one of Winston/Oletus' quirks is that it splits people's souls, so have fun for that being the explanation for Nightinalice or Orph's DID or any ID Swap!
And Essences too are no longer unique glimpses into alternative worlds but just novels Orpheus wrote, of which the writing is so bad I've spent several days trying to decide if it was overly-machine translated, machine generated, merely poorly-written, or all of the above.
Sure, you can say this is all "Orpheus' perspective," and that it should be taken as just that, but novels are always twisted allegories and the writers should be experienced enough to know this. Again, just because you say someone breathes through their skin doesn't mean it's the reason you modeled them in a bikini.
The Joker Studios devs (either by choice or forced by NetEase) are so incapable of trusting you will play this game voluntarily that the gacha system is filled with dark mechanics so you have to keep doing runs, keep playing, keep getting stuff. Maybe you'll get the sword skin you want. Just one more game.
If it's supposed to be a chill single-player alternative, then why have complete random generation of enemy spawns, some of whom can kill you as simple as two balloons wrapping around you? (Of which one of my fellow archivists, who played Elden Ring fine, could't even complete regular mode, as a counterpoint to anyone who says "just play regular.") If it's PvE cooperative, then why incentivize randoms letting you die to steal your stuff without punishment? If it's Survival Horror, why have completely randomized levels and a time limit, prompting irritation than fear? And if it's Extraction Horror, why not embrace the cooperation and the silliness that made these games popular, without an entire gacha and currency system tied to it? Cryptic Notes is trying to be everything and succeeds at nothing.
Most egregiously, it's more profitable to play Cryptic Notes than the actual game. Once you figure out how to cheese the game-mode, you'll collect more steps on the logic path quicker from Cryptic Notes than the rest of IDV. So, unless you really want the portrait frames for Ranking, there's not really a.... practical reason why you should play the game over Cryptic Notes. You can just take photos on the maps for birthdays. You can get event items from Cryptic Notes. So either they patch it to be less profitable (dissuading people from playing it) or they let Cryptic Notes outshine the game itself.
I think, in another timeline, if Cryptic Notes was the new game instead of Sea of Remnants, and that it had significantly more quality care placed into it than "started at the very least around Cage of Yesteryear based off the jump mechanic," then I would've found it a quirky little spin-off to Identity V. But combined with everything above, the intense crunch/quality drop, and the looming paranoia about Gen AI, I cannot look at it as anything but a wannabe Tomb Raiders willing to sacrifice everything about Identity V- the lore, the designs, the gameplay- to stand proudly on the bow of a sinking boat.
For me, all of Cryptic Notes has been a "Sumeru" moment for me, referencing the region from Genshin Impact: A point where the flaws in the developmental plan are not past the tipping point but nearing it, where pandering to the fanbase rather than respecting them is taking priority. Divergence/Game 0 will have a lot of heavy lifting to prove the spirit of Identity V remains.
The worst part about it is, due to how tight-lipped live service games are regarding development, it's impossible to tell whether this (the game mode, the lore, etc) was always the plan or somewhere it went wrong.
I spent eight years waiting for an answer but do I want one?
In the new cryptic notes mode, you can get the DA CAPO music box as furniture! And when you interact with it, it plays the song “Her!” Do you have any idea what this could mean?
I saw! I'm very excited, given DA CAPO is perhaps one of my favorite "lore entries" of Identity V.
I have a couple ideas on what Her could mean. This isn't the melody it plays in DA CAPO, so either they changed the melody it plays, the melody is a variation of "Her," or there are multiple music boxes.
Unlike Time of Reunion, we don't know who composed Her. We have two different suspects: Mrs. DeRoss and Frederick Kreiburg. Mrs. DeRoss composed the "Nightingale leitmotif," which was later used by Frederick in a commission to compose Time of Reunion (Frederick Eighth Deduction). Or, like Time of Reunion, it's possible that it was partially composed by Mrs. DeRoss but finished by Frederick.
Something important to note about Her being the melody is the purpose of the music box: at the end of DA CAPO, it calms down Orpheus, either Nightmare or Detective (or Charm), depending on whether it takes place before or after MEMORY. We don't know who turned in the music box to do this. If it was during the Final Game, it was most likely Alice or Frederick, due to neither being fully accounted for. If it was after MEMORY, it was likely Reichenbach.
The other thing to note about Her is that it's Memory's theme. Something interesting to note is the contrast between how Detective imagines the relationship between Memory and Nightmare vs how it's portrayed outside of his perspective. In Memory's Video and Time of Reunion, Detective imagines Novelist as the hero while Nightmare tries to kill Memory and, according to the Journalist Concept Video, succeeding so. Nightmare himself finds association between Memory's existence as a manifestation of childhood nostalgia and his own, the product of childhood trauma. In external media, he is portrayed as a father to Memory, the same as Novelist. Nightmare doesn't seem to host the same perception of Memory as something to kill the way Detective thought he did.
Putting these two things together, I think it's possible to speculate Memory and what she represents (the few moments of joy Orpheus had in childhood) is a balm to Nightmare. One strong enough to calm him down after mauling Norton. I'm curious, then, whether Alice turned on the music box to calm him down, given saving Orpheus was one of her two rarities, or if it was Frederick for unknown purposes, since it was seemingly set up to trap Melly and Norton as well. Very curious.
I see that I have made a cryptic note about something in a book, almost certainly a long-returned library book. The note conscientiously gives a page reference but does not say which book it is.
I found another note to myself on my phone. Care to guess what it means?
Photo: A screenshot off my phone of a note that says “Ozy” and nothing else.
In other news, Alex went back to school on Monday! Yay!!!
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