Hacknet

The game it's self is well worth the price. However there are many game breaking bugs. Most due to poor goal detection scripting. This trick saved me from having to restart twice. "If you change goals="Content/Missions/lelzSec/NortronBreakIn.xml" to goals="Content/Missions/BitMission0.xml" in ...Steamuserdata%user#%365450remotesave%char_name%.xml" When the developer fixes the bugs this will be my favorite in the sudo-hacking genera.

The faux-tiling window manager, the faux-bash-like shell, the programs which are superficially accurate but practically lobotomized. By all means, I don't think it's bad that Hacknet isn't perfectly comparable to reality: besides the technical hurdles, a slightly-fictionalized Universe lends itself better to suspension of disbelief. Take for example the fact that the executable binaries are appended with "exe". Considering the audience of this game, that makes sense, because it's only a cosmetic difference and doesn't disrupt the core mechanics of the game. That's a great idea. However, compare this to something like TIS-100 or Human Resource Machine, the two of which are actually very mechanically similar, and you'll learn to appreciate brevity and simplicity in a puzzle game. What's frustrating is when I hit Ctrl-m for the tenth time expecting the shell to behave like bash, only for it to do nothing. It's awful for flow, and that's not really desirable for a video game. What Hacknet needs is practical omissions in order to make the game fun and better-paced, not the opposite. I discovered quickly that because of how the game interfered with my muscle memory, changing into directories, listing the contents – things that I can do in my sleep, otherwise – became a Goliath task, so much so that I found myself reaching for the mouse as much as possible. Honestly, the narrative elements are kind of cumbersome, too. The focal point of the game is clearly the novelty of its interface. It's a shell simulator for an audience that wants to sit comfortably behind a meter of bullet-proof glass, lest the coreutils jump out and bite you; it's for the kind of people that sneer at you the second you open up a terminal emulator to grep something, rather than unleashing a slurry of mouse clicks, .desktop files, and qt programs begging for five dollar donations, and too often I feel like its core merit for superficial appeal.

I wish it had a proper save system where you can save when you want. I've replayed the same part of the game starting from the beginning because of how pissed I got at missing a choice for been 1 second too slow, twice. I'm not doing it a third time. I could copy the savegame directory I guess to simulate a proper save system, but I'm not going to do that. I'll just play something else instead.

I tried Uplink before. The control are all mouse, and when things goes wrong, you can easily get crushed by a misplaced click. In Hacknet, everything can be done with only the command line, which have auto completion, so quickly jumping from one server to another, breach, steal what you need, clean up and get out is so much easier, everything is a few key away, not hidden away in a maze of menu. The experience is really more straightforward, the Labyrinth add on is really worth the price, the Hollywood Hacking is believable enough to not break immersion.

This was probably a very novel game when it came out, about 10 years ago. But since then, there have been iterations and refinements of the genre that make this game obsolete. There is no nostalgia factor either. If anyone is interested in this kind of "hacking" game, I would recommend "Bitburner", which is free, has more complexity and depth, and is generally better than Hacknet in every single way. It is also very clearly inspired by Hacknet.