I would say both!
My original concept for this jam was actually really similar to this, but I ended up going with something simpler due to time. So it was awesome to see this entry, and I thought in concept all the bits and pieces you had were great.
Functionally, as you know the puzzles were a bit tough (as you ended up putting answers in your description). I actually think some small tweaks could help a lot. For example:
- Make sure important text someone has to read and input somewhere else is free of extra spaces and line breaks. Both the captcha and email had scenarios where either the reference text or the field you typed in had a line break, which made it a bit confusing (do I include that?). The captcha reference text “istubed my toe is cool” looked like it had an extra space “is tubed…” which might have been a typing issue or maybe the font spacing? And because I didn’t actually look at your username before playing I was very stuck lol
- Give user feedback even when you’re making people wait. In the customer support chat, there were times I felt like the game had frozen because other than the music, nothing seemed to be happening, which I know is honestly accurate to real life lol, but it almost made me abandon the game. (Also I was definitely mashing the number buttons on my keyboard for the menu because I didn’t notice the 1, 2, and 3 buttons floating in a different seemingly unrelated area of the screen.)
So as unintuitive as it sounds for a concept literally about terrible UI and tech loops, a little bit of UI improvement would be great lol. Honestly I would love to come try again to get further if you do an update! This really was so fun. Hope the notes help!