Oblivity Podcast: The Profoctor Predicament

Rating:  Fantastic!
Completion Time: 55 minutes
Date Played: 30th July 2020
Party Size: 1

The Profoctor Predicament … Or to call it by it’s full name The Profoctor’s perfidious, perilous, puzzling predicament! How to describe it? SO MUCH FUN. It’s brilliant, hilarious, charming, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s immediately gone onto my Top Rated list and I can’t recommend it enough.

The best part? The game is supporting not only a brilliant podcast (which you should go listen to over here), but 50% of all sales go towards The Old Fire Station in Oxford, a public arts centre in Oxford that supports artists and helps people who are facing tough times. Which … Let’s face it is an industry that is hurting A LOT right now.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to travel to Research Base Persephone on the planet Pluto. The team that work there have gone missing! Of course, not being of any real strategic importance out there, the mission isn’t essential, but you may as well go check it out. So off you go on your merry way, through a series of really fun and interesting videos that set the scene and introduce the characters.

To help you along the way, you have a printed pack. This short pack contains a couple of samples from the notebooks and, as you’ll come to realise, will greatly help you crack the codes you need to rescue the team.

Without giving too many spoilers away, on arrival you come face to face with a sinister enemy and must play his little game *cough* the perfidious, perilous, puzzling predicament. That’s not all, within each room as you navigate around the base you’re looking for an 8 digit code and an 8 digit word. Very … Mysterious!

It’s not just the story I loved, but the puzzles too! They fit seamlessly within the world and were very unique! I really appreciate going into a game and seeing things I’ve never seen before. The Profoctor Predicament is full of them. In particular, this game contains a lot of logic puzzles in various forms. Planting plants … Picking characters in a game of Annihilation …

… Not least of all in my favourite puzzle of the whole game: the final one! In an exhilarating ending, you’ve got 5 minutes on the clock to solve the trickiest one of them all. To take EVERYTHING you’ve learned so far, tiny little hints throughout the game, and to put them into a grid all whilst the sinister Profoctor giggles in your ear? It’s perfect! It’s the perfect puzzle.

At this point, I should pause to admit that it took me 2 attempts on the final puzzle. In an honestly quite hilarious ‘twist’, your timer runs out and you get a “Well thats too bad, if only you could rewind time.” I mayyyyyy have rewound time at that point, yep. But I mention it because I adored how self-aware the game was at this point. Just one of the many quirks that made this one so much fun.

At the risk of this review becoming too long, I’ll end by saying you get a multiple choice on how to end the game. No idea if I picked the correct one. I didn’t hit ‘back’ in my browser to check, so I’ll just have to live with my decisions. After all … I got the ending that I deserved!

The Profoctor Predicament can be purchased for £5 from the Oblivity Podcast website.