The Forgotten Script vs Final Fortress
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
The Forgotten Script
Read full descriptionHide full description
An ancient script lies scattered across forgotten ruins. Each glyph hides a letter. Each inscription hides a message. Your job: crack the cipher. The Forgotten Script is a meditative puzzle game where you decode encrypted quotes and inscriptions by mapping mysterious glyphs to letters. Start with a few revealed clues, then use logic, pattern recognition, and linguistic intuition to uncover the rest. EXPLORE THE RUINS Each run is an expedition through a series of rooms, each containing a new cipher to solve. Progress deeper, earn higher scores, and uncover increasingly complex encryptions across four difficulty levels — from Novice to Expert. DAILY CHALLENGE A new puzzle every day, the same for everyone. Compete on the daily leaderboard and build your streak. Miss a day? A free rescue is available once per month, and Pro members get a weekly streak shield. GLOBAL LEADERBOARDS Climb weekly and all-time leaderboards across three puzzle languages. Your best four runs each day count toward your standing — no need to grind endlessly. THREE PUZZLE LANGUAGES Decode ciphers in English, Turkish, and Spanish. Each language draws from its own unique bank of quotes and inscriptions, offering a fresh challenge for multilingual players. NO ADS. NO TIMERS. NO NONSENSE. The Forgotten Script respects your time. There are no advertisements, no energy systems, no wait timers. Play at your own pace, offline or online. FORGOTTEN SCRIPT PRO (Optional) A single lifetime purchase unlocks: • Expert difficulty level • Themed visual palettes — Desert Tomb, Jungle Temple, Crystal Cavern, and more • Access to past daily puzzles • Detailed stats and run history • Streak Shield — one automatic save per week The game is free to play. Pro is for those who want to go deeper. FEATURES AT A GLANCE • Cipher puzzles with unique glyph alphabets • Daily challenges with global leaderboards • Four difficulty levels (Novice, Scholar, Master, Expert) • Three puzzle languages (English, Turkish, Spanish) • Streaks, achievements, and XP progression • Beautiful themed palettes for Pro members • Works fully offline — no internet required to play • Sign in with Apple or Google to sync across devices • No ads, no tracking, no analytics SDKs
Final Fortress
Read full descriptionHide full description
Final Fortress is a match-3 puzzle. The whole game is the screen of an old terminal: green text, one cursor, and you, the commandant of the last fortress. It is a quiet game. A working console in the dark, the hum of the systems, static like rain. A watch takes fifteen or twenty minutes: do the day's tasks, read what came in, hand over. Nothing hurries you, and nothing happens while you are away. Come back after a week and the fortress is exactly as you left it. Match tiles to finish the day's tasks. Each task brings supplies. Spend them to repair the fortress: reactor, hydroponics, antenna, armory, infirmary. Every repaired system opens new missions. Match 4 or more to charge special tiles. They clear a line, a block, or every tile of one kind. Swap two charged tiles together and they fire as one bigger shape, up to the whole board. The board gets busier as you go: convoy crates that pay out at the bottom, sealed containers with a special tile inside, interference to clear layer by layer, burned sectors the tiles fall past. Some tasks ask for a pattern: decode a sequence in order, or fill a gauge in every column. AI Madness is a mode of its own, outside the fortress. Each shift bends the rules: boards up to 10 by 13, sometimes only three kinds of tile, cascades that barely stop, tasks that may be impossible. On an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, Apple's on-device model (Foundation Models) picks the shift's character and writes its line in the log. Nothing leaves the phone. Otherwise the terminal does the same on its own. Nothing is at stake and nothing is banked. Every shift has a code. Send it to a friend and they get exactly the same board. There is a story in the log: three acts, four threads, and the notes of the commandants who held the fortress before you. It comes a few lines at a time. Read it or skip it. The game never nags about it. Repair the antenna and you will see a board with other players' stations. It is view-only, there is no chat, and it updates once a day. When the story is over, the log keeps going quietly on its own. The music belongs to your fortress alone. The sound is synthesized live and seeded from your fortress, so your station hums like no other and never loops. The hum changes with what is running, with the hour of the night and with the weather outside. Each kind of tile has its own note, and a cascade climbs the scale. One extra room, The Long Dark, carries a call of its own. Three more stations use the instruments in your phone: a weather post that reads the barometer, an acoustic modem and a direction finder. A home screen widget shows your fortress at a glance, in StandBy too. No ads. No lives, timers, energy or streaks. No pop-ups, no push notifications, no accounts, no daily rewards to come back for. Run out of moves and the terminal just says the packet was lost. Try again, nothing is taken away. You can drop a task at any time. Most purchases are cosmetic only: screen colors, ambience rooms, strike sounds, custom names. One purchase, Support the Watch, buys nothing at all: it is a thank-you and nothing more. Nothing you can buy helps you play, and no purchase moves you up the board. Works offline, on iPhone and iPad. Fully playable with VoiceOver, with a flicker-free stable phosphor mode and a calm mode that softens the board's flashes and haptics.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: The Forgotten Script at every 4 days against Final Fortress's weekly. The Forgotten Script also leads on iOS requirement (13.0 vs 17.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. The Forgotten Script sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Final Fortress sells 4 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
The Forgotten Script ships an update every 4 days, Final Fortress weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 8, 2026 and October 16, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | The Forgotten Script | Final Fortress |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 4 days — better | Weekly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 13.0 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 54 MB | 5 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 12+ |
| Developer | GOKHAN OGUZ | Dmitrii Dark |
In-app purchases
The Forgotten Script
- Forgotten Script Pro$4.99
Final Fortress
- Amber Phosphor$0.99
- Emerald Phosphor$0.99
- The Long Dark$0.99
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- Memory Chip$2.99
Questions
Is The Forgotten Script free?
Is Final Fortress free?
Do The Forgotten Script or Final Fortress have ads?
Which is updated more often, The Forgotten Script or Final Fortress?
Other comparisons















