The Stack

While we’re on the subject of puzzle books, there’s one other I’d like to describe. Tachyon, by Stephen Boughton and Daniel Sage, is very much in the vein of Journal 29: each two-page spread presents a single puzzle (which, in most cases, doesn’t really need that much space), and solving it gives you a word that feeds into a later puzzle. It’s essentially the same format as Codex Enigmatum and its sequel, Codex Mysterium, except that in those, solving a puzzle gives you the key directly, and in Tachyon, as in Journal 29, it’s indirect: solving a puzzle gives you a password to enter into a web site to get the actual key. Still, all four books are similar enough in format to clearly belong to a distinct mini-genre, and I find myself wondering about its origins. Journal 29 is the oldest of these books that Amazon recommends when I look at any of them — is it in fact the thing that the others are all imitating, or does it go back further in time?

Of all these books, Tachyon is the one with the closest thing to an actual story. It’s still mostly suggestive theming rather than narration, but there is some narrative, at least, spread out over both the pages of the book and, occasionally, the web site that provides the keys. Basically, it’s about the narrator’s attempts to decipher the notes left by his missing father, a physicist. Find the codes to activate his machines and possibly you can turn back time and stop his disappearance. Not that the puzzles that occupy most of your attention are particularly related to this story.

The puzzles, as in all these books, are short, and consist mostly pictures and diagrams presented without explanation, or with instructions consisting of a couple of key words from previous puzzles. The whole challenge in each is figuring out what the author wants from you. In that respect, it more resembles an adventure game than a puzzle hunt. There’s some reliance on technological knowledge: one page expects you to know how to send text messages with a numeric keypad, which was a stage of phone technology that I personally skipped over. And honestly, I found some of the puzzles unsatisfying, either because they were too facile or made what I felt to be unreasonable assumptions, causing me to seek hints even though I had got the central insight right.

But I have to give it kudos for its ending. This book plays with form in a way that none of the other books I’ve mentioned have attempted. Spoilers ahoy.

The web site that provides the keys prompts you for a solution to the final puzzle just like all the others, even though there’s no possible use for a key from there. When you do, it gives you the story’s climax: the narrator’s discovery that he made a mistake in interpreting the key word from the very first puzzle. This produces an entire chain of revisions: change a key word, and you have to redo the puzzle that uses it, yielding another altered key word, until you reach the final puzzle. As in the story’s premise about going back in time, you get a chance to do things over and make them right.

Now, this means less than it probably sounds like. The nature of these puzzles is that there isn’t much to solving them a second time: you’ve already had the crucial insight into interpreting them. Also, the indirectness of the keys means that the puzzles aren’t really related to each other in a way that would be complicated by the altered chain. Still, it’s kind of impressive to realize that each puzzle involved had to be designed around two different solutions, with just a word making the difference. Moreover, I find it encouraging to see this kind of playfulness in what was otherwise seeming like a very rigid format. Maybe there’s some real potential in this mini-genre.