Really fun and clever idea! It took me a couple of tries before I understood what to do for the password. I thought I had to read the button mash stuff to find it, and some of it sometimes does reference passwords lol. I think it was also confusing that a lot of buttons don't do anything when it's waiting for the prompt, which made me wonder if I had to like select the UI with the mouse. On the other hand, the click part was immediately understandable. I understand the critique about taking the hand off the keyboard being frustrating but I actually think that switching of gears was fun for me.

awesome little game, I remember using hackertyper in college to fool people. So smart to use button mashing  as a foundation for a hacking game. I think the little minigames do a great job of making it engaging.

First of all, I wanna commend you for your positivity and your dedication to playing and providing good feedback to every one of the other jam games!

Second, great job on this game! I love jam games and games in general which lean into their silliness, and keyboard-mashing hacking is a fantastic way to do it, and you really nailed to aesthetic on basically all of it. The music is great and drives the player forward in a way that matches the visual aesthetic really well, and the game itself is pretty quick to understand and pick up!

The scoring is maybe a tiny bit opaque, and also heavily biases scoring towards players with better keyboards that have n-key rollover, since you get 1 point per key pressed as far as I can tell. Most keyboards only have 6-key rollover, which (in case you aren't a keyboard nerd) means that the keyboard can only correctly register up to 6 simultaneous separate key presses. On the other hand, some gaming keyboards, especially high-end keyboards, have n-key rollover, which means you can press every single key on the keyboard and it will still register new presses properly. With an n-key rollover keyboard, I can smash my entire hand into my keyboard and instantly get 10+ points, and before even lifting that hand up I can mash my other hand down for another 10+ points, whereas a cheaper keyboard this tactic would only net 6 points total.

I managed to get just over 1,500 thanks to my unyielding trust in my keyboard to take any amount of abuse I can throw at it, alongside a handful of attempts to figure out how to optimize the game a little. I don't think that the mouse sections necessarily take away from the game, but I do think it creates a little bit of conflict within the current design.

The conflict with the mouse ties into another (minor) conflict that the game feels like it has internally, which is the pull between being entirely what it wants to be (a fun, low-stakes game about hacking with microgames sprinkled in) and being a score attack arcade game. The reason that this introduces tension, in my opinion, is that the microgames are not all created equal - some of them take significantly more time (clicking the numbers in particular seems quite slow), while others are extremely quick (clicking the popups can be done very efficiently by mashing click in the center of the screen, arrow keys can be mashed through very rapidly). Since the microgame choice seems to be fully random, it is entirely possible to have significant swings in your score simply by virtue of your microgame luck.

I think that this is the source of some people wanting the mouse games taken out entirely (moving your hand takes longer and loses you score!), since there's some frustration involved in this luck aspect if you're chasing a high score.

If you were to continue development on this, I would love to see it outside of the context of score attack, as a short game with an absurd over-the-top leet hacker story, with some more variety in the microgames. Basically all of my critiques would be instantly solved by this change of context, and I think it would be super fun based on what you've already made.

Really enjoyed this. Clever idea that is well executed. Small thought, could use some different audio cues for when minigames appear (different ones for different games would have good messaging) and audio for when inputting during those games.

I think with the length of the play session the frantic nature of switching hands around feels like chaos, which is good. If play was longer I think you would need to look at the hand switching stuff to make it a little more user friendly.  (Random distinct ideas for ways to change it-> limit how frequently those type games appear, pause energy leak till you detect mouse movement, give a warning beat that a shift is about to happen, have two "modes" that you specifically tell the player to switch between ie. keyboard  mode and a mouse mode). But all that is besides the point, game is good, well done!

The idea behind this is great lol, I really liked playing it! I would have played it more if I wasn't afraid of breaking my laptop keyboard.

- Visuals: The hacking! The pop ups! It's perfect for what it is.

- Audio: Love it, I'm guessing early 2000s Y2K era influence?? It felt like it would fit right in with a dreamcast minigame, at least. 

Engagement: I am going to be team pro "switch to mouse". It provides a frantic tension to the game that would be sorely missing if you took it out. It's great to always be on guard and be ready to switch on a moment's notice, in my opinion.

Spectator Appeal: This will be a great one to watch others play for sure, especially as they get it. I would recommend bringing some sort of disposable keyboard to the live event, because it's gonna get mashed.

Ease of learning: basically the same feedback as engagement. My one big thing: for the passwords with exclamation marks, it's especially easy to hit "Enter" instead of "Shift" to get the "!". When that happens, it seems like the player loses focus away from the input box, but that's not immediately obvious. I'd see if there was a way to either avoid that from happening altogether, or give some visual cue that the player needs to click on the input field again.

Button mashing is a lot of fun. Having to use the mouse for certain things does break the button mashing flow.

Fun idea! At first I couldn't believe that just mashing all the buttons worked, that was a cool concept. It was the first game that I replayed after losing which is a great sign! Online leaderboard is a nice touch.

I think taking out the minigames that require mouse would probably improve the experience - having to take my hands off the keyboard felt backwards because I was trying to mash buttons. Also at a certain point it felt bad because the hacker energy was decreasing faster than I could type, but I suppose the only other way to handle that is to make it go down even faster during minigames.