Very clean aesthetic. I have to admit I'm struggling to understand how to go about solving the puzzles, but I'm also very tired! I'll give this another go after another coffee :)

Very cool project! The style looks well polished and appealing. The sound design also draws you in right away.
Providing note sheets is a really great idea. I would love to see that more often in puzzle games!


we hate you

and also we are not sure if there is a mistake or we are just too tired to finish the puzzle


I have finally conquered the beast. Through a mix of translation, python scripting, and brute forcing I managed to get all the words as well as the 'post velocity noise' pattern.
I'll put the python script I used below; maybe it'll help others ;)

The way I used the script is by first manually calculating the shift value from the first word, then plugging those into 'cur_shift'. Then I put all the unsolved words into 'word_list' and ran the script. It prints out possible answers showing which direction it shifted the cipher and noise pattern.
'left-to-right' starts from index 0 of cur_shift, and moves along the ciphered word from left to right.
'right-to-left' starts from index 1 of cur_shift, and moves along the cur_shift values.

```
# Add shift value from known cipher in the positive form.
# ex: 'rgdjvf -> signal' would be [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (r = 18, s = 19)
cur_shift = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
max_num = 122 # z in ascii
min_num = 97 # a in ascii

# List of unsolved ciphertext from the game. Use lowercase
word_list = []
for to_shift in word_list:
# Print the original
print(f"Original: {to_shift}")
start_pos = 0
end_pos = 0

print("left-to-right")
while start_pos < 3:
shift_pos = start_pos
arr_pos = 0
cur_word = "_" * shift_pos
while shift_pos < len(to_shift):
temp_num = ord(to_shift[shift_pos])
# Shift w array
temp_num += cur_shift[arr_pos]
while temp_num > max_num:
dif = temp_num - max_num - 1
temp_num = min_num + dif
cur_word += chr(temp_num)

#Increment
shift_pos +=1
arr_pos += 1
start_pos += 1
# whats the word
print(f" {cur_word}")

print("right-to-left")
while end_pos < 3:
# Don't need to check full 6 sub
end_pos += 1
shift_end = len(to_shift) - end_pos
shift_pos = 0
arr_pos = end_pos
cur_word = ""
while shift_pos < shift_end:
temp_num = ord(to_shift[shift_pos])
# Shift w array
temp_num += cur_shift[arr_pos]
while temp_num > max_num:
dif = temp_num - max_num - 1
temp_num = min_num + dif
cur_word += chr(temp_num)

#Increment
shift_pos +=1
arr_pos += 1

cur_word += "_" * end_pos
start_pos += 1
# whats the word
print(f" {cur_word}")

# Break between words
print()
```

Definitely not the best or most thorough helper script, but it worked for me™️


Apart from the helper script, I must say I really did enjoy this game. I love challenging 'ciphers' like this, even though they definitely aren't for everyone.
If anything, a good/convenient addition may be an interactable noise tool in game. One where the user could input values for the noise, and they could enter/move the ciphered text along noise positions to check for words/parts of words. That could 'gamify' it a bit.


A couple minor inconveniences:
- The game resolution is too large to view in my browser.
- For the notes tabs, CTRL-C / CTRL-V / CTRL-F doesn't work, and arrow keys go to the previous note
- The word list is not sorted alphabetically. This makes it hard to verify if a word is possible.

For the game itself, it would probably be good to start with a simpler setup to introduce the concepts, like two pairs of words with the same shift patterns instead of 8 words. And you could also add some interactible UI like for each answer word have 6 boxes with a letter in each, and up and down arrows to shift these letters.

I think the strategy to solve this is to apply the 6-part shift pattern from SIGNAL to all of the other words with some index offsets and use this to learn slightly more of the cipher key. So I get 433443 and then try ?43344 and 33443?. But I don't want to do that by hand, so a spreadsheet or something is necessary.

I found one word this way as a proof of concept, but I'm not sure that I want to go through and do the rest.