The Cypher (video game)
1996 video game by EPG Media Inc.
The Cypher is an interactive fiction video game by EPG Multimedia.
Plot
The Cypher is a digital interactive fiction novel in eight episodic chapters that explores a murder mystery spanning ten centuries. Characters include a medieval lord, a 1900s archaeologist and a modern-day criminologist.
Players act as time-traveling detectives investigating two murders committed by the same murderer a thousand years apart. They explore numerous locations as they hunt for clues, a hidden chamber beneath a medieval castle, the offices of a Scotland Yard inspector, and the hotel room of a modern-day cryptologist. Along the way, players sift through forensic evidence, examine ancient manuscripts, decode encrypted emails, pore over illuminated books, or puzzle over ancient technology.
The story opens with John Shoresby, a cryptanalyst for SciCrypt Systems, who receives an email message from an unknown sender with no traceable source and no Internet identifier, as if from thin air. The message pleads for his help and asks him to look into a hundred year old missing person's case. When he downloads the email attachments, he recognizes the face of one of his ancestors, James Francis Ravenshim, an archeologist that vanished without a trace in the summer of 1900. Intrigued, he starts to dig into the case and discovers nothing is what it seems.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65040558. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Cypher (video game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.