Did you like Papers, Please? If so, then Morse might be right up your alley.
Morse’s concept was initially inspired by a Morse controller built by its creator, Alex Johansson. In short, it’s a game that puts you in the shoes of a Morse code operator during the First World War. As such, you’re tasked to navigate your army’s artillery strikes by sending exact co-ordinates for land, air and sea battles. And yes, I’m literally talking about a game that uses Morse code as its main control method.
Being free and ready to play in your browser, I decided to give it a shot only to end up being utterly confused after a few seconds. Half an hour later though, I found myself furiously tapping the arrow keys, switching between bombarding air planes and sinking battleships. As you’re constantly expected to switch between land, air and water overviews, you’re expected to input the co-ordinates of enemy forces on a Battleship-esque board setup – letters representing columns and numbers outlining rows.
In a way, Morse manages to give war games a very unique spin by putting typical shooting and combat aside, but still possessing a significant sense of urgency and tension. It’s actually really surprising to see that such a simple game can be so addicting, difficult and rewarding simply due to its unique way of making you control whatever’s happening. With a certain dose of abstraction, you even start realizing how impactful a single push of a button really is, and that’s something that your good old modern military-shooter hardly manages to convey.
Small figures disappearing into the ground and pixel sprites of ships sinking into the depths, Morse is simply an abstract representation of the harshness of war… Deep thoughts aside though, just imagine someone well-versed with Morse code playing this game.
Random stranger, if you happen to be that person, you can play Morse in your browser.
Original Author: Georgi Trenev