Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• Decode() is a triumph of style over substance. It has well-selected soundtrack and nice choice of colours. However, what really makes it stand out is the decision to use gradual, smooth movement from tile to tile. It is a rare feature in roguelikes, and for a reason: even though the levels are small just getting around becomes much slower as the result. Likewise, there are only three types of objects throughout the entire game - doors, elevators and terminals - and interacting with all of them could be handled with standard "bumping" into them. Instead, there are separate keyboard buttons for interacting with all of them, as well as the need to confirm them with Enter. Altogether, this slows the game to a crawl. Moreover, there's not much else to look at: all terminal hacking is just the matter of pressing Enter in response to prompts until you finally succeed: while you can theoretically fail by running out of energy, it never matters in practice - you are much more likely to fail by getting permanently stuck inside the corridor corners. The game does feature "Reset Player" option to counter that, but it is itself bugged - once you trigger it once, pressing Enter will always throw the character back to the starting position, up until you abandon that run. You get experience for successful hacking, but will max out your level well before the game ends, even if you only interact with the beneficial green terminals. The game apparently features a bad ending, but you have to explicitly try to get it, since even the UI strongly suggests which actions are required for that. I have beaten the game once, and gave up on the other ending after repeated bugs with getting stuck in the scenery, or even the level generator occasionally creating starting rooms where both doors are locked behind codes you do not have yet.