Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Team Fractal Alligator
Premise: After becoming the recipient of a Dead Man's Switch email from renowned hacker Bit, you set out to track down whatever caused his disappearance.
Release Date: 13/08/2015
A.N. Hello everyone! I'm finally back after who-knows-how-long on hiatus from exams. Jeez, I've missed this. To make up for the last few weeks, I'll be double updating this weekend, and over the holidays I intend to get ahead of the game (no pun intended) a bit and write a few reviews preemptively in case I have to go on hiatus again, so that we don't have a big-ass wait like this last one (again, sorry about that). So, without further ado, I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
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So, as mentioned above, I've had exams recently, which has somewhat hampered my ability to play things to review. However, I did manage to play a few quick things in the occasional break from study. As you may have guessed from the title, one of these games was Hacknet, a hacking sim (and here I'd like to quote directly from the official website) "so real you shouldn't play it in an airport."
I first encountered Hacknet at PAX Aus last year, where I managed to fail rather dismally at the tutorial. Hacknet isn't a game that's here to hold your hand, make no mistake. I'll confess to having made several trips to one of the Steam walkthroughs, on some occasions because I was massively thick and had no clue how to do something, on others because I'd simply written down a password wrong, and on others because I'd accidentally bugged out the game and physically couldn't proceed with the story. One of Hacknet's main selling points is that it doesn't have specific mission boundaries, just contracts that give you an objective in a persistent world. However, one of the difficulties you tend to encounter with Indie games that try to have a persistent non-linear world with a semi-linear story is that it all looks and feels very immersive until it starts bugging out because after a while it just becomes variable hell and the designer throws their hands in the air and goes "screw it, that'll do."
You see, towards the second half of the game you start working for a company called CSEC, and several of their contracts which are vital to the continuation of the story only unlock once you get ranked #1 in the company, which you can only do if you complete all of the available contracts. So if like me you accepted a contract to investigate a way to decypher ".dec" files, and like me decided that it sounded too hard for your current understanding of the game, and like me dropped the contract, and like me you swiftly realised that you actually needed that mission after all and it wasn't as hard as you first thought, and like me you discovered that you can't re-accept contracts after dropping them, then like me you'll find yourself needing to restart the game from the start.
So what I'm getting at is that it'd be nice to be able to accept more than one contract at a time. Not necessarily all of them at once, but it'd be nice to be able to hang on to two or three at the same time, especially when you start getting multiple contracts that require you to hack into the same computer. I appreciate that it helps to add a bit more to the total run time and that from an in-world perspective it makes sense for you to only have one job at a time, but it doesn't make sense to me that we have to log into the Death Row database, delete a fake file, remove all the logs saying that I did that, disconnect, log back into CSEC, pick up the other Death Row database contract, edit a file, log back into the Death Row database, upload the file, remove all the logs that say I did so, and then disconnect to continue the game when it seems like I really could have done this all in one go.
Before I go any further, I should probably clarify that despite the problems I mentioned above and the problems that I am in fact about to mention, overall I really did enjoy Hacknet, and I'll probably buy the DLC later this year when it comes out so that I can have an excuse to play it some more. Any complaints I may have are really just nitpicks that didn't really bother me that much (with the exception of having to start again from scratch), and the core concept is rather fun and interesting. Ok? Ok. Back to nitpicking.
The story takes a bit of time to get really interesting; It starts off strong, really dramatic with Bit's email and everything feeling tense because we don't know what's going on, and then half an hour later I looked up and still wasn't entirely sure what was going on. The tutorial ended and I was told to go through the trial process for this hacking group called Entropy for a reason that never really gets adequately explained, and then Bit's story kind of goes away for a bit (no pun intended) while we get to grips with the mechanics of hacking, and then it comes back towards the CSEC bit when we get told to look for him, and the overarching plot rears its head once more as this computer security conspiracy shows up and it does get quite interesting at the end. I won't spoil what happens exactly, but I will say that I wasn't giving the game enough credit with the flak I gave it in the opening half. There are also a couple of other quite well-made moments in the story that put interesting twists on the established mechanics and breathed quite a bit of life into the game as a whole.
The main gameplay is (as one would expect of a hacking game) based around hacking computers. You do this by connecting to the computer, looking at what Ports the computer has, and running your .exe for that type of Port, so the majority of the game's run time is waiting for the little animation for each of the programs to finish so that you have enough space to run the next one. After a while, you'll have figured out what the most efficient order to run them all is and after that the only difficulty is if you get a traced computer or you need to open a Port that you don't have a specialised version of SortThisShitOut.exe for. As I mentioned when I was talking about the story, there are some interesting moments that turn the game's usual mechanics on their head, like when you get hacked by some other bloke and you have to fix your computer with only text commands available instead of the usual interface you have to work with, but these moments are few and far between.
However, that's the boring bit. The fun bit is once you've gotten into the computer, where basically every file (that isn't encrypted or password protected) can be read to flesh out the world and characters. These tend to manifest as things like IM logs, company memos, journal entries and stuff like that. Most of that's just trimmings though, and the actual contracts are generally just things like "find the password for this guy's email account" or "delete this file here" or, in one mission that nearly made me put down the game and end my break early so that I didn't have to contemplate what I'd just read, upload someone's appallingly bad screenplay to an agent to get it past a secretary. I appreciate that the writing for it was supposed to be bad, but it succeeded so well. It doesn't bother me too much because it's only necessary for one mission and you don't have to read it, but the writer in me was absolutely cringing.
One of my personal favourite contracts was Project Junebug, which I feel perfectly encapsulates some of the best bits of the game as a whole: an interesting contract premise with one of the most appropriate changes in the soundtrack (which is pretty good to begin with) in the entire game, with a meaty challenge that required you to dig through multiple computers on your own without hand-holding, before a final stage that made me feel like I needed to get up and just take a walk to contemplate the horrors of what I'd just done. However, it felt like the big challenges like Project Junebug were few and far between until the end. I'm definitely looking forward to the addition of user-made contracts, which will hopefully add a bit more variety and difficulty, but until then I'm not able to definitively pin anything down for the gameplay. Good at times, repetitive at others, but it helps serve the narrative quite well while it's there.
I'll give it props for the structuring though; It definitely feels like at the first planning meeting one of the devs went "Alright. Here's what we'll do: we'll write and design the beginning first, the ending second, and we'll work our way up from there", which actually works quite well with how the game as a finished product turned out; The story was there to sucker you in, then it went off to one side for a bit while the central mechanics were being introduced, and by the time the mechanics started to get a bit repetitive the story was back with a vengeance to carry it home. At the end of the day, I can definitely recommend Hacknet, but that does come with the qualifier that i'm willing to overlook a few issues for the sake of the story.
As always, anyone who has a suggestion for a review, rant topic, or just wants to say "hi!", can do so by emailing me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com
-Harry
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