Looks and sounds beautiful, but when it comes to "gameplay" the only interaction you're going to get out of this game is typing in the puzzle solution. You'll be solving puzzles either with pen and paper or in some notepad since there's no ingame system for puzzle solving.

There's a variety of cryptographic puzzles (6 categories in total + a group of puzzles which require "skills" learned in the other 6 categories) of increasing difficulty and a lot of these puzzles are very very hard, i've only done 34% (less than 15 puzzles) in my 9 hours played.

So really, is Cypher worth buying or not completely depends on if you mind paying for a collection of puzzles with no gameplay attached accompanied by a beautiful classical music soundtrack and a short info/wiki about the types of cryptographic problems you'll be solving.
To me that wasn't an issue and i've enjoyed this experience a lot, but i can easily see how someone wouldn't want to pay 5e for that. You could probably find these cryptographic puzzles online and get (depending on who you ask) the same/similar experience for free. Compared to some other games by this dev, this game doesn't have a lot of "game" to it and that might turn some people off.

Looks and sounds beautiful, but when it comes to "gameplay" the only interaction you're going to get out of this game is typing in the puzzle solution. You'll be solving puzzles either with pen and paper or in some notepad since there's no ingame system for puzzle solving. There's a variety of cryptographic puzzles (6 categories in total + a group of puzzles which require "skills" learned in the other 6 categories) of increasing difficulty and a lot of these puzzles are very very hard, i've only done 34% (less than 15 puzzles) in my 9 hours played. So really, is Cypher worth buying or not completely depends on if you mind paying for a collection of puzzles with no gameplay attached accompanied by a beautiful classical music soundtrack and a short info/wiki about the types of cryptographic problems you'll be solving. To me that wasn't an issue and i've enjoyed this experience a lot, but i can easily see how someone wouldn't want to pay 5e for that. You could probably find these cryptographic puzzles online and get (depending on who you ask) the same/similar experience for free. Compared to some other games by this dev, this game doesn't have a lot of "game" to it and that might turn some people off.