MORSE

A telegraph key, a war at sea, and a studio from Brighton

MORSE is the full release from ALJO Games, a Brighton-based studio, released 11 November 2025 for Windows following a public demo that toured indie showcases including EGX in Birmingham ahead of launch. Players defend against successive waves of the Kaiser's Imperial German Navy during what the game frames as a fictionalised World War I naval conflict, using real Morse code as the entire input method: dots and dashes are entered to move a cursor through an ever-shifting grid of letters and numbers, revealing the positions of approaching ships before sinking them with a small selection of artillery types, including specialised weapons for dealing with harder-to-detect U-boat enemies. Narrative context arrives between waves through in-game telegrams, giving players a sense of the escalating conflict without pulling focus away from the tactile, timing-driven core loop the entire game is built around.

A game that genuinely teaches what it claims to teach

The single most consistent thread running through MORSE's review corpus is enthusiasm for how effectively it teaches real Morse code through play rather than instruction. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically describe picking up genuine, lasting knowledge of the code as a direct side effect of simply playing the game, with one detailed review, from a former merchant navy deck cadet who spent days studying Morse code for a real signals exam, specifically wishing MORSE had existed back then to help. That praise recurs often enough, and with enough specificity about individual characters players say they've internalised, that it reads as a genuine design achievement rather than incidental marketing language. Atmosphere and presentation draw consistent, specific credit alongside that core system, with reviewers praising the pixel-art visual style, a soundtrack more than one reviewer specifically asks to have released separately so they can listen to it outside the game, and emergent storytelling delivered through wave-to-wave telegrams that reviewers say add real narrative texture without slowing the pace. Difficulty progression draws its own specific praise, with reviewers describing the moment the ship-tracking grid grows too large to view in full at once as a genuinely thrilling escalation rather than an unfair spike, and several reviewers explicitly credit the game with prompting them to buy or 3D-print real telegraph key hardware to deepen the experience further, one detailed review even sharing a link to their own printable telegraph key design for other players to use.

A timing system some reviewers say fights its own goals

Set against that praise, a smaller but detailed and specific minority raises complaints that land with real weight precisely because they target the systems the majority praises most. The most consistently repeated technical criticism concerns MORSE's input timeout: reviewers describe a rigid, roughly five- character entry window that, once a player realises mid-input that they've made a mistake, offers no clean way to reset, forcing them to either spam additional filler dots and dashes to force the entry to clear or simply wait out a lengthy timeout before trying again. One detailed critical review argues this timing rigidity actively works against learning, since the artificial five-character frame doesn't match how many real Morse characters are actually structured, meaning players spend more time fighting the game's transcription habits than looking for ships or absorbing the code itself. A related, more structural complaint concerns the game's shifting letter-to-grid mapping: because the code required to reach any given position changes between waves, and enemy submarines further scramble the required input mid-encounter, at least one reviewer argues genuine long-term memorisation becomes harder to build than the game's core educational premise implies, even as they acknowledge shorter-term pattern recognition still develops naturally with practice.

Interface friction at the edges of an otherwise tight design

A smaller, more specific complaint concerns interface legibility rather than core mechanics. One detailed critical review describes a cramped bottom-left UI element that becomes genuinely hard to read once the game's grid grows large enough to require scrolling through multiple rows, making it frustratingly difficult to locate the correct vertical line to target under time pressure during a game's more hectic later waves. That criticism sits alongside a broader, more positive thread of reviewers who specifically praise a "Morse Reset" setting that can be adjusted to "Fast," which several reviewers recommend adjusting immediately as a meaningful quality-of-life improvement over the default pacing, suggesting the underlying timing complaints may be at least partially addressable through existing settings rather than requiring a deeper redesign.

A developer reviewers trust

A recurring, less mechanical thread across MORSE's review corpus concerns the developers themselves. Multiple reviewers specifically describe direct, positive interactions with the ALJO Games team, including one detailed review describing support offered for an unconventional museum exhibit use case, and another describing the team as passionate and knowledgeable when demonstrating the game hands-on at EGX. That kind of specific, repeated goodwill matters for a game whose core pitch depends on trust — players investing hours into learning real Morse code want some confidence the systems teaching it were built thoughtfully, and the corpus's consistent praise for the developers' hands-on engagement reinforces the broader sense that MORSE's educational ambitions are genuine rather than a marketing hook layered onto a conventional wave-defense game.

Value

At NZ$20.49, MORSE sits at a fair price for a genuinely novel strategy game that most reviewers describe as delivering real, lasting value beyond its roughly three-to-five-hour campaign, given how many reviewers report picking up an actual transferable skill along the way. The Very Positive score — 117 positive against 8 negative across 125 reviews — reflects a review base won over by a rare combination of tense, well-designed tactical gameplay and genuine educational substance, tempered by a detailed, specific minority who make a fair case that its input timeout and shifting code mapping create friction that works against the game's own stated goals. For fans of minimalist strategy games and anyone curious about learning real Morse code through play rather than rote memorisation, MORSE is a strong, distinctive recommendation. </content>