Hollaring about Hacknet

    Hacknet was recently given away for free, so I took advantage of that and tried it.  I beat it, and now I'm writing about it.  Funny how that works, huh?

Couple things to preface this with, as usual:
• I like the idea of a hacking game, but I've not found one I really liked yet.  Uplink comes close gameplay-wise, but the resolution issues keep me from enjoying it much.
• I play on Linux, so I may have performance issues or bugs where you won't with other, more well-supported operating systems.
• This one will be light on screenshots because the game doesn't change drastically over time.  If you see a couple screenshots, you've seen most of the important parts
• I'm a hackerman IRL, so you'd better take me seriously or I'll get my dad at Nintendo to ban you forever from Steam.

    With that out of the way, let's get started.

Do it look nice?

    Yes it do.  While it's not highly customizable, there are a few themes to choose from, and I think most themes do look very nice.  Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a way to choose one at the start, and you can't easily know where a theme you may want is or if the theme file you're looking at is going to be different from the one you already have.  Pretty much, the Theme Switcher you get later on is the best option for trying the themes, but again, you can't really know if you'd be downloading a new theme when you find a file unless it's specifically named to be a different one.

It does look pretty, though I'd like some customization.

    The sound design would be fairly difficult to screw up, and I'd like to report that the developer has not gone through the effort required to screw it up.  It's almost entirely music, and while I don't think it's amazing, I was often too focused for it to get old to me.  There are other sounds, mainly the beeps of any traces on you and the sound of your computer suddenly shutting down when a trace finishes.  There is one very notable use of sound elsewhere, but it's a spoiler I'll get to in the gameplay part.  That use is really, REALLY FRIKKIN GOOD, OKAY!?

    I do have to point out the font size, though.  There is an option menu choice for it, with three choices: Default, Medium, and Large.  Sadly, the text size does not affect the notes, so I regularly found it a little difficult to read my notes when I set the text size to Large, since I don't like to run games under my native resolution, thanks to too many games forcing my monitor to the resolution instead of scaling, which breaks my multimonitor setup.  Outside of that one issue, though, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of visual issues to me, unless you really hate a gradual red thing dropping down on your screen when you get fully traced.

"THE GRADUALLY DROPPING RED SCREEN OF DEATH" may not be catchy, but it is accurate.

    Performance, similarly to the sound, would be hard to screw up.  Similarly, I have good news!  Yeah, I've had good performance with no slowdown throughout the entire game.  I've had one singular crash, and that was during a long session, so I'm not going to say the game is prone to crashes or anything.  It's entirely possible that there was some other circumstance that caused the crash.

    I can't really get behind most of the story.  It ends with an amazing bang, and it starts with an interesting idea (dude died, and is now teaching you how to hack through the glory of premade scripts), but the middle part is almost devoid of interesting developments.  There is one mid-game development that's kind of cool, but it's not that great.  Hell, you could argue there's really not a story between the tutorial and the midgame part, then from the midgame part to the very final few missions.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that there's a second way through some of the middle part of the game.  It's slightly more interesting, but not much more.  Now back to your regularly scheduled review.

Just Play the Damn Thing, Already!

    Honestly, the gameplay is where it falls apart for me.  The basic gameplay loop is:

1. Get a Contract
2. Probe the target system
3. Run programs to defeat that system's security
4. Do the simple task your contract tells you to do

    I think the gameplay loop is often too simple, and I found myself getting really bored with the gameplay by endgame.  There are three "capstone" missions that I think really shine, but they're a serious minority of the content in the game, and even they suffer from the hacking gameplay, since the things that make them good are the non-hacking parts.  To be clear, the hacking is not very fun to me, but those missions force you to think for yourself.  You'll be searching emails, reading other files, and going to a few different computers to piece together the solution, rather than "Hack compooter and delet fills."

    Your hacking tools are far too simple.  Often, you just type the program's name and the port it's to attack ("SSHCrack 22", for instance), and it runs passively while you either wait for it or run something else.  Early-game, this gets boring fast.  Late-game, there are firewalls to keep you busy while your programs do their things, and you'll be going through your rotation of programs as they finish and free up RAM.  Even so, I found late-game to still often be boring, since it's still relatively passive for you, the player.

It doesn't get too much more complicated than this.

    The terminal is also not very great.  I'm no hacker extraordinaire (or am I?), but I have worked my way around a terminal enough to get used to a few things that this game doesn't have.  For instance, I will often use a command like "cat ./FILENAME", and the "./" at the start will often trip up the in-game terminal.  I also dislike that there's no actual text editor in the game.  You aren't meant to use one often, but it'd still be a nice inclusion for the few tasks where one would help.

    I think one of my biggest issues, though, is that there isn't much in the way of upgrades to your kit.  In Uplink, you can upgrade your CPU, your RAM, your hard drive, your modem, and even a couple other unique things.  In Hacknet, I often wished that I could upgrade my RAM, since I was constantly running out of it trying to get my hack on.  Yeah, it's likely partly due to balance, but the solution would be to make late-game servers even more difficult to get into, maybe requiring some out of the box thinking.

TAKE ME DOWN TO THE SPOILER CITY, WHERE THE TEXT IS BIG AND I RUIN THE STORY

    Here, I'm going to spoil what is possibly my favorite mission in the entire game.  If you're never going to play it, feel free to continue on.  If you're still interested in the game otherwise, skip until you see the heading that tells you the spoiler is done.  Seriously, this mission is great, and you'd be doing a disservice to yourself to get spoiled to it.

    At one point, close to the end of the game, you'll get a special mission: A family has contacted the hacking group you've gotten into to make a request, that request being to euthanize a family member on life support.  The family member was hospitalized, in great pain, and generally wants to die.  His family want to grant him that wish.  Enter you, the guy who's to do the task.  Your mission, if you accept it (because you can go "Nope, I'm not getting into this dark shit") is to attack the man's wifi-connected pacemaker, disabling it in some way.

    This mission is amazing in many ways.  The gameplay isn't just "go here, hack thing, win game."  Instead, you need to read company memos to find passwords and notes on devices, you need to search for certain files, and you need to kill a man using the very tech meant to keep him alive.  This mission is where the sound design is brilliant.  When you're connected to the pacemaker, you hear the "beep" of a heart rate monitor.  It's a small touch, but it adds a lot.

    So you accept the mission, go through the long and relatively difficult task of killing a man, and you're at the final step.  I finished it, then stayed connected for a little while longer.  The screen, mimicking a heart monitor, starts showing ridiculous results, as if someone just told a pacemaker "Higher numbers means better numbers".  And then, in a few seconds, flatline, both visually and aurally,

    I may be sucking off this mission more than it deserves, but it worked its charm on me, and showed me that this game is definitely capable of some great moments.  The entire time was stressful, not because the tasks done were themselves stressful, but because I allowed myself to get immersed, so when this mission came up, I didn't just take it as "imaginary kill a dude, kk?"

Yarr, there be no more spoilers here

Yeah, there's a 4Chan-style imageboard site in-game about hacking, and I'm disappointed I can't participate in the shitposting myself.

So, What Do I Think?

    I think the game has some charm, from the easter eggs (IRC logs from bash.org and minor things, like your ISP help number being that of our real world AOL's) to some of the mission design.  I just think that there isn't enough variety in gameplay to warrant a $10 pricetag.  It's decently long, but most of that time was spent doing busywork for the sake of busywork, IMO.  The capstone missions aren't enough to save the overall mission quality from feeling boring.  Graphics are good, music is okay, and the story gets really good at the end but is boring before then.

    Overall, I'm glad I got this game for free, because I wouldn't pay the $10 pricetag for it knowing what I know now.  Honestly, I don't think it even deserves a $5 pricetag.  It just relies too much on the busywork missions and simple gameplay loop to feel satisfying most of the time.