If you're in the market for an immersive hacking simulator that is as authentic as you can get without actually hacking computers for real, Hacknet is the game for you. The game also has a convincing world, a fantastic soundtrack and ethical dilemmas galore, so it's not just a great hacking simulator, it's an entertaining adventure game too. There's not really much to fault about this game except that's it not very forgiving if you happened to inadvertently delete a required file – but hey, you wanted an immersive experience, right?
The "hacking" itself is fun for a while, but the game overstays its welcome. There is too little variety and the small flaws become more and more annoying as the game goes on. The controls are jarring as you miss features like copy and paste and HUD scaling (this makes the game unplayable at UHR resolution).
There are also a lot of small bugs in the game:
- Autocomplete for the last command is broken sometimes.
- The mouse pointer disappears at times. You can fix this by changing the "hide mouse pointer when typing" option in control panel -> mouse, but it is super annoying.
- Sometimes correct passwords aren't accepted on the first try.
- Sometimes a hacked password isn't stored after disconnecting.
All in all, I recommend picking this up on sale.
Never left a review on GOG, and I got this game through steam a while back. Like probably most of you, I was looking for an "Uplink Hacker Elite" like game and fell for this trap.
Here is an exhaustive review I left on steam that dives in the many pitfalls of this "game" (I use the term loosely here).
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198983162925/recommended/365450?snr=1_5_9__402
Let me sum it up for you here:
Let's start with the positives:
-Music and Graphic design are good. It's what most of the people here actually refer to when they call this experience "immersive".
So that's it for the positives.
As for the negatives, I really encourage you to go read my steam review for details. To sum it up here, this is essentially a garbled mess of XML files ran through a parser plastered with some "nice" graphics lipstick.
Some people complain that the game is bugged, and it is, but most people fail to realize that it is the design which is the root of all problems with this "game". In order to finish this game, you WILL need to start editing XML files yourself in order to work around the million bugs which stem from a few key design flaws, the main of which is that the developer clearly set out to build an open world game and then realized it was too hard half way through, and made it a linear experience. This causes major game breaking bugs throughout, especially towards the end of the game (seriously, unless you enjoy starting a game from scratch for no reason, go read my review and google search for the endgame bug for this game...it is quite well documented).
TL:DR; Do yourself a favor...buy Uplink and enjoy an actual hacking game. This is not worth it, at any price.
Installed via the GOG install script, didn't work. Looking into it deeper (by running the start.sh) manually throws this error:
./Hacknet.bin.x86_64: error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
For the life of me I can't find a way to install libgconf.
Installing via lutris also didn't work, can't recommend this game as it is not playable
![](\"https://items.gog.com/hacknet_complete_edition.png\")
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