So confusing! The game dumps quite a bit of information on the different modules right at the start with no actual knowledge of what you're supposed to do and how. There is also no way to go back to revise that information (without fully restarting) which wasn't great.
I couldn't really figure out anything else besides the top left module. Everything else didn't seem to do anything no matter what I tried to do. I get that it's supposed to be about figuring it out and the mystery but it's really difficult to try to solve something when you get no feedback on if what you're doing is even remotely correct or completely wrong. And not sure if it's required to do constantly to progress but the whole wait for stuff to reboot wasn't fun. Making the player just wait for no reason at all (with no stakes either) is never fun.
It had a nice visual look and cohesive style. The sound scape was also very atmospheric and fit the mood. The sounds were a bit barren still though. And the lack of that much visual feedback on different things made it difficult to track down where the sounds were coming from and/or trying to draw attention to.
Ok so I bit the bullet and went for a full restart and now with some actual context and some more careful reading, the help messages made at least some sense. And I did manage to successfully decipher and send some messages. Still a vast majority of them seem to be garbage and thus are just a complete waste of time. I did manage to get few of the real messages through too which seemed to "progress the story" maybe but it gets really repetitive after a few rounds. And the waves are very difficult to tell apart thus needing those annoying reboot rounds. And it really pisses me off that I get an important message, see it has a three minute timer so I decide to send it with the best and longest cipher myself but of course the timers don't run in the same time scale and thus the time runs out before and I'm forced to wait around some more wading through these garbage messages with no purpose.
I did get few credits to my balance but nothing near close enough to buy something. Seems very grindy! Some of the messages (and of course the garbage) didn't even seem to award you with any cash either.
There is very little point of the game being in first person. There would need to be a bit more things requiring moving between stations etc (all the important ones were already in the same spot) and maybe even some time constraints or something. I also found the need to "focus" on a module a bit pointless. Especially since when you were locked in, you could also activate the buttons on the neighbouring module too. Could of have just been free look and click where ever in my opinion.
But anyways, good job on the game! 👍 Would just need a bit smoother learning curve (with those panel informations able to be brought back too for a re-read) and some much needed variance to the gameplay and maybe even some time constraints or other stakes.
edit: Oh yeah and after reading the instructions and figuring out how to use the modules, most of them actually were pretty intuitive and easy enough to figure out by themselves. It's pretty much just the noise removal and then amplitude maximising that wasn't really intuitive. Sure I tried doing the complete flat but didn't come to mind that I should the tune the other dial to pretty much bring it back to the mess it started off with (a bit depending on the wave though).