Abdec is an abusive little thing. It says mean things behind your back and passes along your vulnerabilities to everyone who bullied you as a child. Together, they’re planning a comeback tour.

Designed by Blaž Gracar, one of the up-and-coming designers I’m most eager to follow right now, it’s also fiendishly clever. We know Gracar from two previous puzzle games, All Is Bomb and LOK, both of which were similarly clever and nearly as abusive. I want to tell you about Abdec because it’s a puzzle game for everyone who wrapped up the base puzzles in digital titles like Baba Is You, The Witness, and The Talos Principle, only to crack their knuckles and begin decoding the secret stuff behind the curtains.

The problem is that I can’t actually tell you anything about Abdec. Even the rules are spoilers.

This is not even close to the solution.

Let’s see. How to proceed. How to proceed.

Abdec is a game about fitting shapes onto a grid. Is that a spoiler? I don’t think so. I suspect something can’t be a spoiler if it appears on the first page. Right away, though, there’s some trouble afoot, because Gracar declines to tell you anything about the shapes. Instead, he gives you a letter. “A,” perhaps. Or “B.” You know, letters. Those letters correspond to shapes. If A is a figure-eight (it isn’t), then anytime Gracar tells you to write an A, then you need to squeeze that figure-eight onto the given grid.

In theory, you’re recreating a half-burnt textbook about the lost language of the Abb, diminutive creatures whose speech appears simple at first, only to soon prove approximately as decipherable as that of the aliens from Arrival. By the end of the book, this language will have shifted from a straightforward grid system to… well. I can’t say, exactly. Grids will still be involved. But the letters themselves, the ligatures that bind this dialect together, become something else entirely.

Along the way, expect to fumble. This isn’t your usual puzzle book. Rather than proceeding in a straight line, it’s often necessary to revisit previous numbers. Sometimes to confirm to yourself that you actually know what you’re doing, other times because a later revelation will shock the system and make you realize the last few solutions were busted all along. Unlike, say, a crossword or a sudoku, you’re meant to flail about. The format of Abdec recalls that of LOK, providing a dry-erase pen and a transparent sheet so you can fail at a puzzle over and over and over again, until in a spasm of transcendent realization the entire thing clicks together.

That goes for everything in the book. Individual puzzles, yes, but also broader sets as they introduce new concepts. The symbols are unknown. The rules must be deduced. Even the hint pages are riddles, and the solutions at the back of the book are fragmentary.

What.

This unwillingness to guide its players makes Abdec feel, at times, somewhat mean-spirited, although I very much doubt that was the intent. Its truer aim seems more elusive, found in the moments of relief and insight that follow the struggle. In German there is the concept of the Aha-Erlebnis, the “aha experience,” when through inspiration or experience a troublesome problem is untangled. The knot you’ve been picking at with aching fingernails comes suddenly loose. Abdec is full of such moments. But it makes you work for them.

I’m still trying to decide whether that work is worth the effort. Abdec is singular among pen-and-paper games, a work of fiction and even perhaps art in addition to a set of puzzles. More than both, however, its principal medium is an emotion. Like many puzzle games, it makes you feel smart. But not before letting you feel profoundly dumb. In that instant, Gracar may throw you a thread, but never a lifeline. I respect that. I recall reading a study showing that cheaters receive the same glow of satisfaction that comes from passing a test or solving a puzzle honestly. Something short-wires the cheater’s brain into believing that because they have completed the formal exercise, albeit not thanks to any studiousness or cleverness of their own, they must also wield mastery over its topic. When I read that report, a chill tickled through me. I recognized that glow. It was the same feeling I got when I wrote a good paper. But it was also the feeling that warmed my stomach when I back-proofed problems out of the answers section of my calculus textbook. The satisfaction of solving something is profound, but it’s so easily counterfeited.

Abdec doesn’t permit counterfeiting. At least not as a physical artifact; Gracar has added a file of full solutions to the digital version. I’m torn on this decision as well. On the one hand, I would have liked to check the occasional answer. On the other, I probably would have checked. Maybe even too soon. Why remain frustrated when the answer is one click away? Had I done that, Abdec might not have been a game I fretted over, slept on, and even, on a few occasions, wrote to Gracar about. In those cases, he offered steady advice. “Think on the tools you’ve learned,” he would say. And I would, and the puzzle would slip into focus. And the glow of satisfaction would settle over me, pure and unvarnished by a page of solutions.

But this process is still uneven. Abdec moves in stutters, sometimes gliding between pages, sometimes halting in befuddlement. It’s impossible to determine how much of that pacing is deliberate, or how much is due to Gracar not providing sufficient footing for his players. The answer probably lies somewhere in between. It’s an experimental book, after all, and a challenging experiment at that.

The entire book is full of mysteries.

As experiments go, Abdec might be too big for its own britches. LOK was already a challenging game, one that toyed with expectations and defied gentle explanation. By doubling down on every aspect, Gracar has created a book that’s singularly difficult to penetrate. On more than one occasion, I verged on packing it away altogether.

But that’s also what I appreciate about it. There’s nothing out there like Abdec. I sincerely hope there will be more. I hope Gracar continues to create these strange and evocative tomes — no, not even tomes, mere notebooks, and all the more enticing for their small size. Abdec broke my brain. And then it forced me to put it back together again. I’m left with no easy answers. The process, though, is one I’m glad to have journeyed.

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A complimentary copy was provided.