You don’t need me to tell you that the world is a hellscape lately, but a fun thing about living in it is that it’s full of people with specific interests or niche areas of expertise, and they know all kinds of things you don’t know that you can go learn from them. Recently-released video game Morse is about Morse code, a very niche interest, and is even getting some people into telegraphy, an even more niche interest.
I feel like I’ve been hearing about Morse for years (10 years, apparently!), and it finally released in November. It’s changed quite a bit from the demo I played last year, which featured a narrative; now, you fend off growing waves of enemy ships on a grid you navigate with Morse code.
You tap out letters to move your cursor between grids and squares, all while enemy ships steadily approach from the right side of the screen. You can’t see them at first, so you need to set up mines to reveal them, or fire exploratory rounds to get a sense of what’s happening. As you move through the game, you unlock and upgrade weaponry, but things also get tougher: more ships to beat back, and more rows and columns to frantically dot-and-dash your way around.
I’ve only spent about an hour with the game, but I’ve really enjoyed its very specific mix of stressful and calm. In one way, it’s frantic; there’s way more ground to cover and problems to deal with than I feel like I can, and I’m constantly scanning the field and clicking away with my mouse to dart around. On the other hand, there’s something particularly slow about the whole thing. Tapping too fast will cause you to enter the wrong letter or nonsense instead of letters, so you need to take your time to keep from getting jumbled up. There’s a bit of a delay before you move, and shells take some time to load in. So peppered among a chaotic battle are all these micro-moments of downtime, and the whole game requires a kind of intentionality and level-headedness to succeed at that, when I pull it off, really makes me feel like I’m mastering a skill.
The ideal way to play this game, obviously, would be with an actual telegraph, which has been an option at festivals but less so at home. The Steam forums have a guide on how to get, build, or use one, and players have shown off their own versions online. It’s a game that invites weird controllers and making your own weird controllers. While I am not a controller sicko like Chris Person, I can respect people who are, and the pared-down input required for Morse seems like an approachable way to get into tinkering.
Morse code and its preservation isn’t something I’ve thought a lot about, but there’s a whole world of enthusiasts out there keeping it alive. In an email, developer Alex Johansson said he hopes to use Morse to introduce more people to a hobby with an aging population, which is an issue I have literally never considered before–what happens if there’s no one left alive who knows Morse code? I love how such a simple little game has given me a peek into a whole world I knew nothing about, with its own customs and lingo and values. Instead of doomscrolling the news, you could be learning Morse code! Maybe the world isn’t so bad.
