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(+1)

The atmosphere here is excellent. The CRT and VHS shader is one of the best in the jam, the screen curves at the edges, the scanlines shiver, the phosphor green burns against the black. It genuinely looks like an old monitor in a basement, which is exactly what the premise needs. And the ASCII art logo filling the top of the screen is a lovely bit of care, it sells the "you are at a real terminal" feeling before anything happens.

The numbered menu fits the aesthetic perfectly, no buttons, just digits, and leaving levels 2 and 3 as ??? with empty ranks creates a real pull to unlock them. And the commands scrolling past are well written and actually make you think: "Disable firewall temporarily?", "Download free_ram.exe?", "Isolate legacy system driver?", "Establish VPN tunnel?". You can work out which are traps and which are legitimate, but it isn't obvious, and that's good puzzle design. It also worked first try, I navigated with S, swapped the verdict with A and D and confirmed with Space with no trouble at all.

The one thing you should fix before anything else: THE SCORE SCREEN IS BROKEN. When the time ran out I got the ASCII Score header and then Time: 00:06, Fails: NULL, Rank: NULL. NULL in the two fields that matter most. In a high score jam, the final screen showing NULL where the rank and the error count should be is the most expensive bug this game could have, and it looks like an uninitialised variable rather than anything deep.

Second: there's no feedback at all during the round. I got verdicts right and wrong and the screen never changed colour, never flashed, never made a sound, never showed a counter. You play 45 seconds completely blind, not knowing if you're doing well. Even a single green or red flash per verdict would transform how it feels.

Three smaller ones: the browser tab says "No Circumstances (DEBUG)", so a debug build got published. The ">" cursor marking the selected line is tiny and the same colour as everything else, I lost it several times. And the game window is wider than the screen, at 1280px the TIME counter on the right was cut in half and I only saw the full timer at 1600px.

Atmosphere to spare and a mechanic that works. Fix the NULL and add in-round feedback and this becomes one of the good ones in this jam. Freely downloadable forever is the right end of life answer too.

Hi, thanks for playing! I'm really glad you liked the atmosphere. I spent a lot of time searching for a DOS font that properly supports Cyrillic characters, and that VHS shader took quite a few attempts to get right. The ASCII art and other details were added as the cherry on top, and I was really happy with how it turned out.

Back when I was making Python scripts, I loved creating terminal UIs using the input() command (anyone who programmed in text consoles will understand), and I always turned the text green for that "Matrix" effect. I also put a lot of thought into the commands and questions, so I'm happy the puzzle design worked for you.

As for the score screen: the NULL is actually supposed to be there, but it shouldn't freeze. The design idea is that the NULL values smoothly decrypt into your real score. It worked fine on my end, but I see how it could look like a bug.

Regarding the audio: correct answers don't give any sound feedback indeed, but wrong ones trigger a game of Russian roulette! You can either get a dry click (blank) or a loud gunshot (live round). Sound plays a huge role here—I even put together a whole playlist for the game, so playing it muted completely ruins the experience.

About the "(DEBUG)" tag: I noticed it myself during testing. But considering I’ve only been using Godot for 3 days and this is literally my first finished game ever, I just couldn't figure out how to disable it before the deadline.

Thanks a lot for such an honest, detailed, and massive review! Best of luck with your own projects!