This game is, and I don't say this lightly, amazeballs.
First of all, I adore the aesthetic, both the green-on-black old-school monitor look, but also (and especially) the handwritten-on-graph-paper with doodles on the side look of the help/notes. (OMG the American Chopper meme. Perfect.)
Second, it's just not like anything I've seen before. It's codebreaking but it's not just a mechanical "and now go look up the pigpen cipher" kind of thing, it's clever and non-trivial and yay.
I'm about halfway through at this point (finished both halves of blocks 1-4, haven't yet attempted 1 through 4 or 5), and I'm absolutely going to keep going, but a few very quick, very minor notes:
- There are a few typos here and there (usually not worth mentioning, but in a game all about letters...). One of the manual pages has "expeting" instead of "expecting", which is a nitpick. Two of the puzzles had non-words as inputs: one was MIRRACLE, which is a clear typo. The other was...FOAP? I'm confused by FOAP; I'm not sure what it was supposed to be; but the game definitely accepted that as the input.
- I hope there will be an answer/cheatsheet/walkthrough posted somewhere. Not that I need it! (Of course!) But...I got through the second component of Block 2 mostly with a little trial and error, because the transformations were easy to spot and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the conditional there was. (I almost didn't get the conditional in Block 3, Component 3; that one was rough.)
And I think that's it. Looking forward to coming back for the second half.