Phantom Index
Phantom Index is a word game where you have to find the hidden rules and patterns using the clues in the level.
It rewards creative reasoning and is filled with tons of secrets, so no hand-holding.
About the game
I loved Lingo(the game), but the non-Euclidean physics and navigation made it very hard to recommend to casual players. I built a more approachable version of Lingo with an emphasis on structured levels similar to verbal reasoning tests and still had secrets for players looking to find them.
Demo Features
- Built for both mobile and desktop play
- 50 classic levels
- A daily mode
- 2 secret levels
- 3 secret story pages
If you love the demo and want to decide on the future of the game, kindly join the Discord or support us here on itch.
Development log
- Demo v1.1 Fixes14 hours ago
- Demo v1.0 Launch2 days ago
Comments
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Interesting concept. The levels range from very easy to very hard. I haven't been able to solve any of the code hints.
Bug report:
Little review:
It's an entertaining word game to kill time; I liked how intuitive it is.It also has many secrets, such as codes that (spoiler alert) reveal secret files, and the photos and newspaper clippings pasted on the level panel ARE INTERACTIVE!!!... And they give you clues with the codes; so far I've only found 1
Here U go a little bug report:
I completed every word up to level 30, but the game wouldn't let me progress any further. Levels 25, 26, and 30 were also not marked as completed, even though I finished them. I exited the levels section, and after restarting it, the fourth zone remained locked, so I couldn't continue
If you use hint items to reveal part of a word, then leave the level and re-enter it, the revealed letters remain, but your hint items are restored. This means you can use them again without losing the progress from the revealed letters. As a result, it's currently possible to use hint items infinitely by simply leaving and re-entering the level
I feel like I could use an answer key after solving some of them levels. For instance... (after some spoiler space, so it'll get hidden by a "read more")
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Starting to get a little leery by level 22, where it feels like a guessing game. (Why SOFT and not EASY as the four-letter opposite of HARD? And POSSIBLE isn't particularly the opposite of FACTUAL; it's kind of the opposite of "definite", while "fictional" or "made-up" or otherwise definitely not true is the opposite of "factual".
In fact, currently stuck on level 23, where SEVER sure looks like it follows the rule of "synonym starting with S"...I really love the concept here, but the rules just aren't strict enough in some cases to know what the answer is. (Maybe it could use more hint options than "the first letter or the whole word"?)
Sigh. Never mind. Pushed forward, in many cases by using the pen to fill in the answer, quitting the level, and going back into the level, which reset the pen hint. But Level 32 is literally broken: there's no way to input a number!
There's so much here that seems like a good idea, but if nothing else I feel like it's badly in need of playtesters who can say "this clue was clear; this one was too vague for me to get".
Thanks for the feedback... I agree that some of the rules are not strict enough, and I will review them and get back to you on that in a few hours
I have fixed level 32
To be very honest: since I just discovered that it doesn't save progress, there's pretty much no way I'm going to go back through 32 levels just to get back where I was.
(Well, slightly more than that, because I did use the "reveal answer / quit / reenter" trick to get past 32. But things got more and more frustrating--the level where one answer was IDLE made no sense at all--and when I reached the point where it asked for an anagram of TRIANGLE, of which I should note there are four, and then you couldn't even put in the right answer because there were nine blanks for the eight-letter word....I'd had enough.)
Word puzzles are hard to write. I get that--I know that from experience; I've been solving, and writing, for decades. And the ideas here are good. But if you're not thorough, you're going to frustrate people instead of engaging them.
I strongly encourage you to find people to test the game. (Games in general, probably, but especially puzzles, are almost always harder than the creator thinks: the solution is obvious to you because you wrote it, but that only makes it hard to see what it looks like to other people. The only way through that is testing.)
Very cool. One thing that bugs me when playing, for puzzles that have multi answers, I want to type them in quickly. But, if I submitted a correct answer, the letters I type immediately after are ignored until the animation is done.
Hii, thanks for your feedback
I have added an animation toggle in the settings in which you can toggle the animations