That’s It, I’m Going Back To Games That Make Me Feel Clever
In the review for Cipher Monk, our very own Gareth Brierley said “just as I felt I was warming up, Cipher Monk was over, and it felt like it could well have built in more levels quite easily”. Well, thank you, Gareth, because your wish has been granted: 2026 has seen the launch of two more Cipher Monk games, completing the Cipher Monk trilogy. I’ll make no mention of Gareth side-stepping the review of them both, leaving me to review them instead. There will be no mention of that AT ALL.
Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus started with a bit of a history/mathematics lesson for me. I was not aware of the Cistercian Monks of the 13th century, who came up with a series of scratchy symbols from 1 to 9,500. These ciphers have been replicated here, and form the puzzles that you get to unravel. If you’re a Cistercian fangirl and have been waiting for the chance to show off your skills, this is your moment.
Ancient Calculus What Now?
My first moments with Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus could best be described as ‘utter bemusement’. I was tempted to send Gareth a message and ask for help. There is no tutorial in Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus. There’s not even a text screen with a couple of sentences, simply outlining what your purpose is. You have to work out everything yourself, which would be fine if the game was a maze or a match-3 puzzler. But Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus is actually flipping complicated.
Let’s do the work for them. In Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus, your aim is to achieve the ‘Answer’ at the top of the screen. If it says 9025, then 9025 is the number you need to reach. You get there by moving some small, scratchy shapes on the bottom of the screen. These shapes have values that are determined by where you place them next to a vertical ‘I’ shape. If a square box is placed to the top-right of that ‘I’, it’s a 9. Top-left, and it’s 90. Bottom-right is 900, and bottom-left is 9000.
You should be seeing a pattern here. The box is, very vaguely, a substitute for a 9. Where you place it determines whether it’s units, tens or thousands. And different symbols work in different ways. A triangle is effectively a 5, and permutations thereof. There’s a logic that you start to pick up on. A triangle is half of a square, just as 5 is near-enough half of 9. A 1 cipher actually looks like a 1. We started to come up with mnemonics to help us remember them all, but there’s also a handy cheat- sheet that you can view.
The Sum Of All My Fears
If you have more than one symbol, then you start adding them together. A 50 and a 5 makes 55. You now have enough information to solve the first few puzzles of Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus. Congratulations.
What comes next fries my brain. Because you can also get red pieces (subtraction), and blue pieces (multiplication). They fry my brain because Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus goes against everything I remember from GCSE Mathematics. You don’t follow BIDMAS (or BODMAS, if you’re a little older). Multiplication does not come first, nor does it come second. The order of operations is +, then -, and finally x. I felt like Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus took a running headbutt at my inner maths teacher.
But it mostly fried my brain because these sums go beyond mental maths. Or, at least, they went beyond mental maths for me. I very much learned to settle down with a notebook and pen, plus a calculator iPhone app at the ready. Because it can be incredibly hard to work out how four symbols can make you 7825. My head just doesn’t do that.
A Slightly Skimpy 35 Levels
Still, just like Gareth, I found some approaches becoming clear, just as the 35 levels started to end (which is, if I’m being honest, on the low end, considering the puzzles must take a few seconds to make). I was memorising the symbols which – damn you, Cistercian Monks of the 13th century – can look very similar to each other. I was learning to reverse-engineer the answers by dealing with the multiplication first. And I was learning to hate the L-shapes which could be a 7 OR 8 derivative.
And I came to the same conclusions as Gareth. I don’t think Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus is for me. It’s a level of mathematical puzzlery that goes beyond what I enjoy. I’m more a man of words than numbers, so the mental maths broke me, while the sheer number of permutations broke me some more. I appreciated the authenticity of replicating the original ciphers, but some of the ciphers are just too similar in shape and use. If this were a modern, accessible game, this kink would have been ironed out.
But while it’s not something that I enjoyed, per se, I can absolutely see someone else enjoying it. Mathematical whizzes, and people who find the Countdown number-round too easy will lap this up. It’s for people who know their 15 times table; who like to memorise the various decimals of pi. There must be so few games that are made for that group, and finally Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus is here.
If you’re a maths prodigy or know one, then Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus is tailor-made for you. It’s a little bit of symbol matching and a lot of mental arithmetic, all wrapped around some neatly presented calculus. But if you’re a dullard like me, then you might want to steer clear. Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus does a very good job of making you feel like a moron.
Important Links
Decode Historic Symbols In Cipher Monk: Ancient Calculus – https://www.thexboxhub.com/decode-historic-symbols-in-cipher-monk-ancient-calculus/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/cipher-monk-ancient-calculus-xbox-series/9NVW8P5H0BHN/0010
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/cipher-monk-ancient-calculus-xbox-one/9NWVXL19M4RR/0010
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/cipher-monk-ancient-calculus-windows/9NVBZ8KMMZ8G/0010
