Imagine the empowerment of executing a line of effective and largely improvised code combined with the ignorance that you’re just moments away from shooting yourself in the head. At its best, Quadrilateral Cowboy is all of the fun and experimentation of retro-future cyber heists without all of the existential horror that comes with most definitions of mortality.
This is an interesting temperament, though one that isn’t immediately revealed to the player. When Quadrilateral Cowboy begins, your squad is an alternate history 1980 riding hoverbikes and primed to steal a deck (read: personal computing device) from a train car. Before long you’re trained to pound basic lines of code into a DOS prompt to manipulate the surrounding world and engage in any number of high stakes heists. To turn an identified laser off for three seconds, for example, you plop your deck down on the ground and enter laser1.off(3) into the text field. Magically, the laser goes away for three seconds.
It’s important that the laser doesn’t go away for more than three seconds because that’s when the alarm will sound. Alarms are technically survivable, and some can even be turned off, but it avoids the spirit of Quadrilateral Cowboy’s carefully planned heists. You want it all to be precise and perfect and marvel at a joint successfully cased and an idea meticulously executed. Besides, an alarm is even more unpleasant when my friends play Quadrilateral Cowboy and see a sloppy, penalty-ridden time on the leaderboard.
Quadrilateral Cowboy layers in additional commands without diving too deep into programming lessons. Before long, you can set “wait” actions for events to occur while you’re in motion. Later, you can use your deck to provide instructions to a small quadruped drone that can connect to and manipulate on/off terminals. Eventually you acquire a suitcase rifle can that can be manipulated to shoot any manner of objects. The drone and the gun even make use of a little close-circuit television that can be haphazardly positioned next to your deck. There’s something wonderfully kitschy about the whole process; a person performing a dangerous heist…while lying on a filthy floor with giant computer and some video equipment tumped over on its side.
It’s important to note that Quadrilateral Cowboy’s mechanicsare both acutely detailed and very easy to perform. The game has a roving obsession with in-game manuals—operating the drone, adjusting the axes of your rifle, basic deck commands, changing the oil on your hovering base of operations—and every process has instant documentation available and ready.
While Quadrilateral Cowboy’s manuals may seem like a hole of inescapable information, they’re better employed as reference material. Learning basic syntax was an unwieldy process, but the remaining 95% of the game was more about experimentation and execution than fiddling with obtuse code. The ability to use the up and down arrows and instantly summon previously-entered lines of code is a godsend to time and ability. You know what you’re doing, and Quadrilateral Cowboy does too.
It’s weird when Quadrilateral Cowboy’s mid-section goes off script. Without specifically explaining how it changes, it feels like Quadrilateral Cowboy is building up a set of skills before briefly abandoned them in favor of a different style of game. What’s introduced is cool, and eventually it’s all rolled into to the familiar hacking sequences, but it’s a weird divergence in a shorter experiences. In a way Quadrilateral Cowboy feels like Superhot or even Super Mario Galaxy 2, games that could have easily been twice as long had they been interested in repeating their impressive tricks. While I value brevity (something that’s only been a virtue in my 30’s), it’s hard to shake the feeling Quadrilateral Cowboy left a lot on the table.
Anyone who’s played Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving, two of Quadrilateral Cowboy’s tangential analogs, should be familiar with Blendo Games’ penchant for culling a story out of serene flourishes. There is no dialogue, just environmental ques and inference on the part of the player. Through this, we learned that the player character is part of a downtrodden hacker squad with their eyes on an ambiguous prize. Sometimes they infiltrate a series of bank towers and steal a vault, and other times they invade stratospheric space stations and steal brain data from sleeping people. Normal stuff, for Quadrilateral Cowboy’s ode to grimy retro futurism.
Despite the absence of a formal narrative, Quadrilateral Cowboy presents an ability to tell an effective story. Every one of your operations is ostensibly in VR, a repeated dry run for the real thing down the line. Operations in the hideout come bundled with other members of your team idling away on some gadget, but more interesting are the interstitial sequences bookending missions. Sometimes you’re picking a partner up from their residence, and other times you’re playing badminton with her on a rooftop. These are tiny sequences you can freely push past, but they’re loaded casual details that lay the groundwork for an overarching narrative. It’s hard not to imagine all three of these women as lifelong buddies with a shared commitment to their craft.
An undercurrent of humor also reels through every mission. In one particular instance I was standing on a glass roof trying to figure out the best way to launch myself over to another tower. By chance, every time I had plopped down my launcher, I did it on a steel beam that bisected glass panes. On one attempt I tossed it right down on the glass, which shattered the glass, which resulted in me falling to me death. For a brief but also interminable moment I had no idea what happened, and when I dawned on me I just sat there and laughed at myself. With several opportunities for weapon hijinks, launcher fun, and any manner of unexpected oxygen depletion, Quadrilateral Cowboy is a qualified professional in emergent humor.
For the first time in recent memory, someone has managed to make a game like Portal without trying to make a game like Portal. When your code works and your plan is executed, you feel smart and capable. When you string together chaos and barely make it out alive, it feels like narrowly avoiding a car crash. Breaking through the abstract narrative and absorbing Quadrilateral Cowboy’s whimsical world carries its own esoteric sense of accomplishment. Formalized precision and personalized anarchy may seem like adversarial operations, but Quadrilateral Cowboy makes room for the player to indulge in its delightful rebellion.
