Quadrilateral Cowboy

256k all the way

Quadrilateral Cowboy’s puzzles are mostly a joy to play. Its command line hacking is surprisingly accessible and pleasingly tactile, and when combined with its many interesting gadgets it allows for plenty of creative problem-solving and freedom in tackling all manner of whimsical cybercrime. While not all of its levels shine as brightly as the rest, I’m already feeling beckoned back by its replayability and charm, eager to experiment more with the futuristic, hacker-themed playground it so stylishly constructs.

Commit clever crimes in a weird and wonderful technoverse.

In 2011, when describing why Introversion had abandoned Subversion, their long-in-development heist game, designer Chris Delay described a problem with the genre: "In the end, after all that development and years of work, you still completed the bank heist by walking up to the first door, cracking it with a pin cracker tool, then walking into the vault and stealing the money. There was no other way to complete that level. And this would be the essential method by which you would complete every level after that."

It’s the dead of night. You clamber up through a hatch to see the skyscraper where the confidential contract you need to photograph is hidden deep within. Using your portable computer, referred to as your ‘deck,’ you hack open doors and grates to amble on toward your target, disabling security systems along the way. When you finally reach your target, you snap some shots of the contract and then leave just as quietly as you came, vanishing without anyone ever knowing you were there. The perfect crime.

A smart, engaging puzzler with a great central mechanic.

Quadrilateral Cowboy’s a game that gets hacking right – if you permit me calling it that – with the command line interface brilliantly letting you manipulate the world and use the other tools of the cyberpunk heisting trade. It’s effortlessly cool, from a slightly nerdy retro perspective, but hidden beneath that, there’s a simple and very ordinary feeling tale of a trio of kickass women living outside the law and pulling off ever more outlandish heists.