МIИISTЯУ OF SIGИДL by 7uc4s
You’re a communications surveillance clerk... for the Ministry of Signal. Or at least, that is what your papers say. You lied to get the post, and now you spend your nights in the dark, listening through static and reporting suspicious transmissions to the same state you never wanted to serve. You do it because the alternative would be worse. For you. For your family. The game is about ambience, immersion, and the slow, uneasy routine of a person trapped in a job full of regret.
📋 INSTRUCTIONS
- Search the frequency band to find hidden transmissions.
- Stabilize the radio by adjusting knobs and switches.
- Listen, observe, and report suspicious communications to the Ministry of Signal.
- Use the typewriter to prepare your report.
- Click the post-its if you need a reminder of how the radio works or what your job is.
🕹️ CONTROLS
Keyboard/mouse
- Click switches to toggle them
- Rotate knobs by clicking and dragging up/down
- You can also use the mouse wheel on knobs
- Click the typewriter at the bottom of the screen to open/close it
- Drag and drop the paper to position it correctly in the typewriter
- Click the help post-its to show tutorial information
- Click trash bin to get a new form
- Click mailbox to submit form
- Enter full-screen by pressing F11 or in the Video menu
:book: :eyeglasses: DETAILED GUIDE
- Goal : close 'illegal stations' by submitting a form with the correct content
- Step 1 : RADIO - get clear signal
- Tune the frequency knob (bottom center-leftish knob)
- Left lamp stops flickering once the frequency is right. Green circle (magic eye) indicates overall quality.
- On each of the 3 controls group row, you get 2 knobs and 3 switches to adjust
- You need to find the combination that maximizes the signal clarity, indicated by needle-display on the right
- No need for perfection, printer blinks green when ok enough.
- Check radio right lamp, if it becomes bright, means close to overheat (will reset knobs)
- Green circle display on top-left indicates overall quality, full circle means best.
- Step 2: FORM - write the report
- Click on the typewriter at bottom left of screen to make it pop
- Align form fields with typewriter head (yellow), click and drag form
- Fields, top to bottom:
- Time and date, you just need the right numbers, e.g. :
12 15 1 12 55is ok for 12:15 01.12.1955` - Speaker name
- Important keywords (at least one)
- Related names (at least one)
- Click on mailbox on the right to send. Form with feedback gets pinned on wall.
- You get two attempts for each station
- Step 3: back to step 1, find next station and see what happens :)
📷 SCREENSHOTS
Ratings
| Overall | 188th | 3.904⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 470th | 3.308⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 110th | 3.923⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 12th | 4.615⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 98th | 4.423⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 47th | 4.192⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 61th | 4.288⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
But it works well, good job
Turning the knobs felt a bit weird at first, but after a few tries you start to get the hang of it.
Having a good enough reading out of the printer feels almost impossible with how much the radio overheats, I think having it reset itself completely might be a bit much?
And man, that typewriter mechanic is amazing, feels very satisfying to use!
All of the little interactions work so well. Tuning in the radio is very confusing at first, but one you start to get the hang of it, starts to feel very natural. I'm not sure I love the overheating mechanic, but it may be that I was misunderstanding how it worked. I thought going slower and waiting a while after motions would help, but sometimes it seemed to overheat after quite a while of inactivity. Eventually I just learned to allow the radio to overheat, then quickly reset to the settings I had previously. Maybe that's not intended, but it worked well for me.
The typewriter is _extremely_ cool. It feels so immersive to go typing actual text onto the page and have things _just work_. I was entering the wrong time format for quite some time before I realized that I had the months and days reversed, which was a bit frustrating, but easily remedied once I noticed what was going wrong. I'm still not completely sure what sort of content is supposed to go in the keywords field, but it works pretty well to just note any words that seem like they _might_ be keywords, and once I stopped worrying about making the page look "pretty" and just entered all the stuff I saw that might be a keyword, things went much better for me. Sometimes the radio would be just out of tune enough that I missed a key letter in a name, which was a little annoying, but generally on the next scroll things would be clear.
One thing I really wish I could have had was the ability to scroll back through the output paper logs. I was a bit surprised when I tried to do this and couldn't, actually, just because the paper feed really _feels_ like it's scrollable. It was a minor complaint all told, as there's lots of time given for each signal to record it all.
Overall the whole package just works so well together. The music and sounds are perfect, and the whole mood of the ensemble is extremely tight. I have not gone back to replay the game with the skills I learned in the first playthrough just because of time constraints, but if I end up with some spare time another day, I'm seriously considering it, as I'm curious how/if things would be different if I got a much better report.
Extremely impressive. Thank you for sharing, and I hope you're proud of what you put together here!
Also agree on the form filling, way too complicated plus not obvious what to put in, but that's also why we were not so strict on it, and even failing to fill the form will let you move to the next day. But you got it right, the form can be 'bruteforced', there's no penalty for entering wrong words :P
And as a matter of fact, we did plan to add scrolling on the printed paper, but time did not allow for it :( maybe for a post-jam release?
Anyway, it's really cool to get this kind of feedback, and knowing that some people enjoyed our work, many thanks 🫡
It was also a cool feature, that you actually had to use the typewriter.
One tiny thing: I could still control the buttons below the document, while dragging it around, which caused me to reset the whole thing more than once while typing.
But overall a very cool game!
I think a lesson was learned on this one : difficulty balancing is tough, and we probably need to think it better next time, not necessarily lower it, but maybe going incremental or something, idk (:
Anyway, huge thanks again to everyone for playing, hope you enjoyed it, and see you next jam!