The music, visuals, and aesthetics work great. However, when you open the keyboard, it janks the view downwards and causes an unstylish scroll bar to appear, which is not a good UX for a time-sensitive game.
The game feels a bit random, and you broke the "minesweeper rule", so my first guess could be an alert node. Typically, you want to avoid the situation where your first (random) pick could cause trouble.
This is definitely retro, and I could see a polished version as part of a cyberpunk hacking minigame if this was what you tried to gauge! Not sure if it is noir, though.
Instructions could have been a bit clearer.
Play game
Terminal Breach's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall - Is this game fun and great in all aspects? | #2 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
| How retropunk is the game (style, gameplay, aestethics and so on)? | #3 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Theme - how well do the game make use of the theme? | #4 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
| Overall | #4 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
The music, visuals, and aesthetics work great. However, when you open the keyboard, it janks the view downwards and causes an unstylish scroll bar to appear, which is not a good UX for a time-sensitive game.
The game feels a bit random, and you broke the "minesweeper rule", so my first guess could be an alert node. Typically, you want to avoid the situation where your first (random) pick could cause trouble.
This is definitely retro, and I could see a polished version as part of a cyberpunk hacking minigame if this was what you tried to gauge! Not sure if it is noir, though.
Instructions could have been a bit clearer.
Submitted
Twilight's EdgeI really like the aestetics both visually and the music plus the "pulse" really adds to the tension. IMHO, the sfx for success could be more happy and the fail sound is a bit too loud in comparison.
The game itself, as far as I have played, is a bit too random it feels, some kind of pattern to make it possible to avoid the alert nodes would have been nice (or have I just missed it?).
Maybe not specifically hits the cyber noir theme, but it is cyber punk enough and very retro to weigh that up a bit I think.
nice work and a neat submission; hopefully you will make the complete game ready soon!
The game works and seems rather polished. I hear the work in the sound design which tries to create tension. However, the "fail" sound is far more prominent than the "success" sound.
From the game design perspective, it is a combination of Battleship, Minesweeper and Word Guesser, with weights on letter frequency. This may be solid but has a random factor which makes the learning effect unsteady. I was able to solve more passes with time, but success does not equal fun here. In comparison, the hacking minigame of Cyberpunk 2077 relies much less on randomness but on "seeing the paths to the right combinations" (logic). So it conveys the feeling of hacking more, and it was more fun (to me, at least). The hint "Avoid alert nodes" seems rather useless when the player clicks mostly by chance (unless he uses one of the rare Probes or has found a black field before) and can run on a "mine" at any time.
A letter game is clearly retro for me, and to breach a terminal is very cyberpunk: well done. But is it noir? Sorry that I don't see the noir aspect very much in it, too. It would work in any standard cyberpunk as well.
You described it as an element of an upcoming bigger game. Use the opportunity to tell more about it. ;-)
Submitted
Gradient 2047Thank you for your feedback! The noir part is definitely a stretch. There is a pattern but, part of the game is figuring it out. In the larger game, this mini-game, is meant to act as a way to bypass parts of the level examples: hacking terminals unlock doors, acting like a shortcut. The shortcut is the reward.
Very hard game. It's tricky enough with trying to guess what the password might be, but with the timer and mines as well, it gets very hard. Maybe some indication that you might be near a mine would be helpful if this is meant to be a subgame (or it's a way of increasing the difficulty).
Submitted
New Golden Life
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.