MORSE Press Kit

FACT SHEET

• Developer ALJO Games
• Release Date Demo available, full release 2025
• Store Page MORSE on Steam
• Platforms Desktop and Steamdeck
• For a press copy, get in touch via Twitter!

DESCRIPTION

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Vanquish the Kaiser's Imperial Fleet using timing, tactics and telegraphy in MORSE, a minimalist strategy game that teaches you the lost language of Morse code.

The Kaisers Fleet approaches! It falls to you to learn the lost language of Morse Code and repel the naval onslaught through timing, tactics and telegraphy. 

MORSE is a minimalist, wave based strategy game elegantly operated with just two controls, Morse and Artillery:

• Enter dots and dashes to navigate an ever changing grid of letters and numbers.
• Unleash an arsenal of artillery to reveal hidden enemy positions with the flash of your strike and swiftly sink them with precision and speed.

Between waves, upgrade your reconnaissance and firepower and bolster your blockade of sea mines crucial to holding the line. With each wave the waters change, new letters are learnt, shells are spent, ships scuttled and defences tested. Can you prevail? 

Telecommunicate. Illuminate. Eliminate. Upgrade. Blockade. Prevail.

Can you change the world with the push of a button?

TRAILERS

ANNOUNCEMENT TRAILER

EXHIBITION TRAILER

BUILD YOUR OWN TELEGRAPH

FEATURES

• A strategy game that uses only two buttons to operate.
• Learn a lost language playing an endless array of codename generated maps. 
• Compatible with actual telegraph keys, such as iambic, side swiper and semi auto.
• One button, 36 ways to push it!

PRESS QUOTES

"Strip out the intermediate layers of complication, and Morse’s protagonist is effectively a drone operator. Heck, don’t strip these layers out; the game practically does that for you. War in Morse is a series of mechanical abstractions: grids, vessels, coordinates, outlines. Who, to paraphrase Orson Welles’ The Third Man, would care if one of those little specks stopped moving? "
David Rudin, Killscreen

"As you might expect, all of the above can be turned on you, thus any strategy I attempted to employ under pressure regularly broke down, degenerating into a stramash of button-bashing and curse words. It’s great."
Joe Donnelly, Rock Paper Shotgun

Even having only played a small slice of what's to come, though, Morse is already shaping up to be a novel and compelling take on real-time strategy games
Katherine Castle, Rock Paper Shotgun

"MORSE is a game that highlights how simple a game can be while containing depth, complexity and joy."  
Colleen Macklin, Indiecade

ABOUT MORSE

MORSE has gone through a number of iterations over the years, but the game began its life as a clothes peg. During a workshop in 2015 I realised a peg could make a satisfying telegraph key, which led to a flash prototype built in Stencyl. 

Several years later and 6 games under my belt, I received support from the UK Games Fund to establish ALJO Games and develop a vertical slice of MORSE in Unity with a team of artists, writers and musicians. To accompany MORSE, the game was toured with a handmade telegraph, 1930's antique telegraphist headphones and a spring loaded launch button made out of a vodka bottle lid.

MORSE visited America, South Korea, Japan and the UK and won a number of awards in experimental design and introduced people across the world to telegraphy. This unfortunately came at a cost - I burnt out on the project to the point of hospitalisation so took a multi-year hiatus from the game. On reflection, I recognise now that the "upgrade" to Unity and focus on appeasing publishers was a mistake that needlessly bloated the scope and budget of the project and wasted my time. 

After several years exploring designing games for audiences outside of conventional markets and leaning into my more experimental work, a Playdate telegraph peripheral I built for fun was well received on Twitter. This inspired me to revisit MORSE, this time returning the project to Stencyl. This remake was far more cohesive, polished and sleek in scope than its predecessors and after a couple of years working on and off with the game, it's finally ready for release. 

My primary goals for MORSE are to inspire new generations of telegraphists and Ham Radio operators and revive a dying language. The hobby is increasingly suffering a drought of new blood and the membership is ageing significantly. MORSE has been built with support for different types of telegraph key and I'll be actively encouraging audiences to build their own rigs to operate the game. 

Myself personally, I've acquired 7 different types of telegraph, from a British Bathtub Key, a Japanese HI-MOUND Key to a tiny USSR telegraph key. As an educator and avid alternative controller designer, I've recently found a way that people can repurpose hardware from a USB Mouse to build a makeshift telegraph games controller. This opens up the possibility of  potentially thousands of people getting to experience MORSE in its authentic form and a path into Ham Radio.   

I'll be touring MORSE around Ham conferences, communication museums and Radio communities and I'm in early talks with a radio society to use the game for public outreach with the young. I'm also extremely excited at the possibility of engaging elderly ham radio operators with video games, bridging an intergenerational gap and catering games to older audiences who are often overlooked. My dream would be to witness an elderly seasoned telegraphist speed run the game.

If you want more information on the project itself, check out the dev log on TIGSource!