If you’re a tech/computing enthusiast (ok, geek) like I am, Hacknet is going to be quite appealing. Or if you just like a good hacking sim that doesn’t cater to your every need and lets you figure things out for yourself, Hacknet also deserves a spot on your watchlist. For $10 or less, you can’t go wrong. Depending on your speed and thoroughness, you can expect a solid eight or more hours from it and I’m hoping we’ll see some DLC or a sequel down the road.
Ok, so where does all of my enjoyment and excitement for this game come from? Well, it’s not from the graphics I can tell you that. This is terminal-based game so it’s nearly all text. No cutscenes, no 3D animations. The UI is nicely designed however as I’ll describe later — the graphics fit the atmosphere of the game, but at first glance they might not appeal to you. Sound effects are few and rarely heard, and, strangely I’m not hearing a soundtrack although I have the volume up; anyway. In a lot of ways, playing this game reminds me of some of my day job duties, too, which you would think might make it less appealing for me. Yet, every time I fire it up, I’m compelled to play for a couple of hours or more at a time, and having a great time in the process.
There is actually a story to Hacknet, and it’s interesting. You play a nameless/faceless/voice-less dude with some basic UNIX terminal skills. One day you receive a message from Bit, a supreme hacker whose failsafe mechanism kicks in after he fails to log into his machine for fourteen days. Apparently, he’s dead — and he’s contacting you, via a pre-programmed script, to ask that you figure out what happened and keep his proprietary Hacknet-OS from being stolen by malicious entities.
The story takes somewhat of a backdrop for much of the game while you work on a series of contracts, adding more skills and tactics to your hacking arsenal as you go. There are several organizations that you will encounter as you progress, but the gameflow remains largely the same. You’ll check your mail for a new contract, read the details, accept, and prove yourself. The UI is accessible and well laid out, and you can change both the layout and the color scheme after a few hours when you get the ThemeChanger program. All of your tools and pertinent info are displayed at the ready, and as timing and efficiency are crucial to success, that’s all the better.
Timing comes into play because you’ll often faces challenges that pit you against the clock. Once you have identified your target host, you’ll probe it for open ports and then prepare your hack tools to make an opening, from which you’ll run another program to crack the password. After getting root, you can peruse the file system to add/remove/change whatever it is you need, or want, to do and go from there. Generally, you’re up against a time limit, so you’ll have to have your plan of attack ready to execute. Subtle audio and screen flashing warns you of the progress of the countdown timer. Oh and, don’t forget to leave enough time to delete your logs before you disconnect.
The flow of the game is basic in that high-level sense, and admittedly a lot of the entry-hacking is fairly automated. You’ll learn pretty quickly what order to do things in, and other shortcuts like having your commands at the ready while you wait for a process to complete. I thought Team Fractal Alligator did a good job of making Hacknet accessible yet it also requires some crafty thinking at times. The feeling of triumph when you figure something out felt more satisfying and believable than in a typical game, too. I think this has to do, at least for me personally, with it being much closer to reality than, you know, Dark Souls or about any other game.
Hacknet is not a tremendously deep or complex game. Instead, it aims to provide players with a pretty darn authentic UNIX terminal based experience overlaid with a cool story and lots of cool missions. Some won’t think twice about skipping this game be it due to the basic presentation or the constant typing. But for those that give it a go, I think you’ll be quite impressed as I have been. There aren’t enough games like this on the market, much less ones that are this fun.
To the summary…