In the past I have had archaic rules about what games I keep on my phone. I used to get sucked into anything I had installed, and at one point I’d spent so much time playing the mobile versions of Settlers and Ticket to Ride that I became miserable and ruthless to play the games against in real life, having spent countless subway commutes training against computers set to hard.
Mobile bangers from Brough: Imbroglio, 868-HACK (PLAN.B), and P1 Select
Eventually I settled on the games of designer Michael Brough: 868-Hack, Imbroglio and mostly P1 Select. The games were nuanced and complex enough to resist simple libidinal addiction but immediate enough to play quickly. All had a similar layout and ethos, and when you instinctively understand the logic of each, the process of playing them feels like Speed Chess. They’re grid-based roguelikes in a more traditional sense of the word, where enemies move when you move. I have spent more time playing P1 Select than some MMOs at this point, and it has become my emergency game when I am stuck in line or at an airport.
But few games have topped the nuance of Brough’s original hit 868-HACK, and now he’s returned with sequel 868-BACK. Building on the original as well as the PLAN.B DLC, 868-BACK takes the iOS minimalism of the original and builds a cathedral of complexity on it. I believe it to be a masterpiece.
“I’m in.”
The original 868-HACK is a grid-based game where you play a hacker breaking into a computer system. The setting of the game is intentionally retro, and your character is an abstracted smiley face navigating a 6×6 grid. The walls are shaped like PCBs, and the enemies are goofy little freaks that look like random shapes or if you tried to draw the Martians from The Muppets on an Amiga.
Each of these enemies is an abstraction of some computing concept: glitches, viruses, daemons. Each moves and acts in a different way: viruses take two moves, daemons take three hits (or clicks in this case) to kill instead of two, glitches can pass through solid blocks. The goal is to progress through the eight stages, collecting as much data in the process, but doing so requires properly arming yourself. You do this by siphoning off data blocks containing powerful programs. The tradeoff is that siphoning alerts more enemies, so the game is ultimately one about figuring out when you have a tactical advantage and pressing that. Usually this takes the form of a choke point and forcing enemies down it, in a process I’ve heard referred to as “waterfalling.” Get to the end of the server alive with enough points and you have won the game.
868-BACK takes this same basic structure and builds outwards. You still start off playing the smiley face hacker, but he is old as hell now, with wrinkles and an eyepatch. Instead of a single server of eight sectors, there are several spanning the course of three weeks. The added complexity necessitates additional tools for survival. You have up to three lives at your disposal, although if you die on the first two servers you fail immediately. Progs still exist and are powered by volts and credits siphoned from the floor, but you begin with one from the jump. Devs (devices) are a new addition, powerful modifiers that are added to your device manager once a server and can be activated one time in each of the eight sectors. Some of those devs are “boostable,” meaning they can be strengthened multiple times over various sectors. There are also scripts, one time versions of progs that can be used in an emergency.
Synergy
868-BACK can be brutally hard, but favors people who notice synergies between groups of progs or devs. For example, “.refresh” will cause every enemy to “transmit” again, briefly turning them into the single, one-hit portal they briefly exist as when they enter the server. This dovetails nicely with “.dial,” a low-cost prog that allows the player to end a transmission before it turns into a foe while also warping the player to that location. Low cost progs like “.lag,” “.peek,” “”.swap,” or “.hash” pair nicely with “.combo,” which eliminates enemies based on the number of progs used since you last moved. The prog “.hash” will move enemies of the same type on top of each other, and “.debug” will eliminate any enemies that overlap with objects or enemies. And then there’s “.gravity,” which drops the player and every enemy like a rock, and which dovetails nicely with “.row,” a prog that wipes out everything to the left and the right of the player. I personally found keeping a written log of preferential prog combos to be helpful, and this is not even getting into dev combos, which is where the real pervert synergies lie.
Of course, Brough is not content to simply make the game larger while giving the player more treats. As you progress in difficulty, each new server you hack adds a different level of complexity, dryly positioned as “bonus power ups.” Lethal Stakes makes the current server an all-or-nothing proposition, making you lose the run if you lose that server. Advanced 3D Graphics turns the server into a first person 3D game ALA Faceball 2000. Servers in general will scale up in difficulty, but the game will also give you new nodes to connect to in the form of black markets masquerading as sushi and ramen establishments. 868-BACK is brutal but fair, capricious in what it gives you yet infinitely flexible and precise with what it lets you do. You can be on fire for a while only to burn the whole run with a few poorly-timed clicks. It rewards thinking three steps ahead as well as saying “fuck it, we ball” and making the most reckless choice imaginable. Sometimes, but not always, the two are the same thing.
The dreams of the past
Cyberpunk works best as a stylistic abstraction. What you imagined hacking was in your youth was never even close to being real, lines of dull text and credit card fraud standing in contrast to the fashion and brightly-colored sprites of the Hackers. 868-BACK is playfully aware of the age of what it references, and even the representation of yourself is visibly old. When you die the first time, a cutscene plays of a steel claw descending on your character, hunched over alone in their apartment. The game is that old dream of dialup turned into an abstraction tighter than a steel trap. It is Number Munchers and Rouge fused with Drexciya, a deep well that keeps going deeper if you let it. Brough’s games have earned an eternal place on my phone, and 868-BACK has now earned that place on my Steam Deck. You can, and should, get lost in these servers forever.
I’m just embedding Drexciya because Tara Macalister’s soundtrack for 868-BACK reminds me of it but on like a Sound Blaster.
Click Here For The Original Source.
