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The 15 best hacking games on PCStick a PIN in it
Stick a PIN in it
Who among us hasn’t wished to be a cool hacker from the movies, like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish (a classic)? In real life hacking things is apparently quite dangerous and hard, but in video games we can crack the system and mutter “I’m in” under our breath as often as we want. Naturally, there have been some fabulous hacking games on PC over the years, and we’ve collected what we think are the cream of the crop of the best hacking games to play on PC right now.
As with our other best of lists, we take a broad view, and there are a view games on here that give an appropriate hacking vibe more than they’ll have you typing commands furiously to break into the CIA’s secret email account. There are others where youarehacking, but it takes a different form to what you might expect. Whatever the case, they’re good fun games and they’ll give you some anti-establishment fun no matter what speed of mood you’re in. We’ll update this list again soon, though, and there are more fun hacking games on the horizon, with titles likeMindhacktaking the fight to our brains, andVice NDRCVRgoing retro.
The best hacking games on PC
15. Watch Dogs Legion
Watch Dogs: Legion - Recruitment ExplainedWatch on YouTube
Watch Dogs: Legion - Recruitment Explained
But everyone in Legion can remote control cars as they pass to smash them into the cyber-cops chasing them, or raise bollards in the middle of the street, or take a sneak peak at the personal data of anyone near them. And while the hacking devolves into slightly messy combat quite often, there’s a lot of satisfaction in keeping it on the hacky downlow. The very best bits in Legion are when you use a little drone spider to crawl through some vents and steal all the info you need without anyone noticing, or zoom through a network of security cameras to pinpoint where the baddies are. And then you can float away on the nearest delivery drone without anyone being the wiser.
14. Ctrl Alt Ego
13. Hypnospace Outlaw
InHypnospace Outlawyou actually work forthe man, navigating through a 90s webspace and censoring any bad or disallowed content with your digital banhammer. But not many games have come this close to capturing the vibe of what it was like being on the ‘net in that era, before the consolidation of webspace into slick juggernaut website. Back when everyone had their own strange blog with flashing gifs of donuts and links to their weirdo metal band side project. The bar to making a working website was so low that people cobbled together some of the most magnificent junk, and Hypnospace Outlaw distils that into a tangled network of weirdos posting and interposting and having a hell of a time of it. Finding your way through it all, discovering clues that lead to unlisted blogs and hidden posters, is a kind of hacking in spirit, if not in literal form. And even if you’re not breaking through firewalls, the hackervibes, the aforementioned Swordfish of it all, are unmatched.
Disclosure: RPS contributorXalavier Nelson Jr.was narrative designer on Hypnospace Outlaw.
12. Minecraft
I’m sorry. I tried to think of a good reasonnotto include Minecraft on the list. It’s a survival game. It’s about punching trees. It has infected millions of innocent children. But the more I tried the harder it became to disregard all the tinkering, toying and creativity that has gone into Mojang’s indie luvvie-turned-superstar. First, people started making16-bit computersinside the game, then they made music box landscapes that could playwhole songs, then they made older Notch gamesinside the game, then they made WHOLE DESKTOPS withfunctioning keyboards.Then they madehard drivesto save all their hard work to, and then, because you need a place to put all these machines, they madethe entirety of Denmark. Even RPS got in on the action, with RPS contributor and living Intelligence Quotient Duncan Geere giving readers arunning lesson in codeusing the game as a teaching tool.
I can understand if some people believe Minecraft is less a hacking or programming game and more of a gameforhackers and programmers. But it’s clear from the above examples that the latter is good enough for the purposes of this list.
11. Song Of Farca
You can ring people to put the frighteners on ‘em with what you know, enhance security footage, and put clues together to trigger the end-game of cases and conversations. At the same time, there’s a larger story about consequences, crime, and the future. It’s not the typey-typey hacker voice I’m in kind of hacking, but it uses your wits in a similar way.
10. Exapunks
Exapunks is another of Zachtronics programming games. After so many puzzlers about tinkering with computer entrails, the studio finally made one themed around a 1990s vision of hackerdom. Chat rooms, zines, pizza deliveries, cybernetic plagues that turn your flesh into circuit board. It’s all there, an accurate portrayal of the decade.
The puzzling is similar to other games from the studio, most notablyShenzhen I/O. You clack away at your keyboard, using keywords and commands to create a little screed of magical electricity. Here, you’re programming tiny spiderbots who can replicate and spread inside the host machine, like a little virus. You can hack a bank’s ATM machine and make it spit money into the street. You can hack a videogame console and share home-brewed games with other hackers in the real world. You can hack y0uR oWn ArM. It’s a good videogame.
The developers interviewed some hackers to research the story of the game, designerZach Barth told Alex Wiltshire. “It turns out that hackers are assholes,” he said. “We interviewed a bunch and mostly they stole credit cards and figured out ways of ripping off phone companies to get free phone calls.”
9. Gunpoint
Pneumatic trousers have never been so inviting. InGunpoint, your shady spy protagonist has to break into guarded buildings and steal data for his private clients. To do this, you’re given the Crosslink, a device that lets you manipulate the wiring of each level. You are essentially a clandestine electrician with trousers that allow you to bound over buildings. You can rewire light switches to give guards electric shocks, toy with the elevator so it travels up and down, and (eventually) you can rewire firearms themselves. Because dystopia.
It isn’t all messing with wires though. Gunpoint retains a love of wacky violence. You can slam open a door in a guards face, jump on them from the ceiling ninja style, or pounce on them from afar and take them plunging from the rooftops, only to smack them in the chops dozens of times after impact. I think this is called ‘social engineering’.
8. Midnight Protocol
7. Hackmud
Hackmud is a terrible, wonderful place. You exist as an AI bot inside a connected future-world. It’s been a long time since the humans died out (or disappeared to space, it’s a bit ambiguous). As such, you must collect and earn GC, a virtual currency, because this is what scrappy constructs like yourself live for. Unfortunately, there areothers. This is an online hacking game, where another player might break into your accounts, steal all your hard-earned digi-coins, strip you of your tools (little decryption programs and the like) and release your location for all to find. If this happens, you are for the scrap heap, little bot. Time to start again.
It’s a difficult world to get into and you won’t get the full benefit of it unless you either spend some time learning basic Javascript or already know the programming language. In MMO terms, it’s akin toEVE Online. The stakes are high, the difficulty curve is obscene, and the universe is full of scam artists. I know, becauseI’ve been one of them. For these reasons, Hackmud isn’t for everyone. But for those who do venture into this Petri dish of paranoid pondlife, it can be a crazy adventure.
6. Shenzhen I/O
Another Zachtronics game? Well, if you’re going to set your games inside the confines of a fictional operating system, why stop at one? Here, you’re an expatriate living in industrial China, working for an electronics firm called Longteng. Email alerts ping and tasks are set. You’ve got to make devices for various clients. Sometimes this is as simple as a flickering neon advertisement. Sometimes it’s a little more clandestine. In all cases, you’re going to have to refer to the manual, which the game recommends you print out and put in a binder (I second this advice).
In many ways, it’s the spiritual successor toTIS-100. You still tinker with numbers, nudging them from one node to another in basic programmer-speak, and you still try to optimise your designs to run more efficiently. But this time there are components to worry about. You move chips and switches and gizmos around on a circuit board. In more ways than one, you’re trying not to get your wires crossed.
5. Quadrilateral Cowboy
It’s not a perfect game but its vision of a retro-cyberpunk Nuevos Aires is detailed and stylish, all warning signs and jump cuts, while also containing some wordless yet oddly tender storytelling. Hacking games sometimes neglect the details of the real world, becoming ensconced in a single screen. Quadrilateral Cowboy reminds you that the computer is just a means to effect change in reality. It’s also gota brilliant cat. Blendo made the game’s codeopen sourceshortly after release
4. Duskers
You know the opening scene in Aliens, where the little probe comes into Ripley’s escape pod and scans down the room with a wobbly blue light? That’s how Duskers feels. You control a squad of drones as you look for salvage among the stars. You need scrap and fuel to keep your ship going. To get this you must board and explore the derelicts littering the galaxy (for reasons not quite clear). Any other designer handed this premise would immediately think: ‘Okay, so point and click control and maybe some hotkeys’. But not Misfits Attic. For this job, you will rely almost entirely on a command-line terminal.
It’s a move that fits perfectly with the game’s atmosphere and art style. The user interface is all about that clunky 1970s Nostromo-vision of the future, right down to the pause menu. Presented with a schematic of a ship, you type commands to move a drone to a power outlet and generate electricity. Then type more commands to open doors. Slowly you make your way through the wreckage, hoping that behind the next door there is no alien menace. This would be terrible news. Your robotic helpers are so fragile they may as well be made of phone screens.
3. Uplink
This is the game that often comes to mind when someone says “hacking sim”. When Introversion came up with Uplink they pretty much redefined what a good cyberpunk PC game should look and feel like. Playing under your own alias on a computer-within-a-computer, you join an agency of hackers-for-hire. You soon begin breaking into networks to alter records, steal data and delete unwanted files. Along the way you discover more programs and upgrade your rig to break into stronger, scarier systems. You also have to bounce your connection all around the world through multiple IP addresses. This tapped into the theatrical conception of hacking at the time - the scene from Goldeneye were Natalya traces Boris’ connection, the digital heist of Swordfish (which we keep mentioning because it’s a cultural touchstone).
2. Hacknet
Hacknet was slightly overlooked. Like Uplink, it puts you in the role of a computer user trawling through IP addresses, mingling with underground hacker communities. An unknown benefactor known as ‘Bit’ has granted you this strange new OS, basically a hacker’s toolkit. But don’t worry about him because he’s dead. The real joy of the game comes not from figuring out his death or the origins of the OS (although that’s a decent hook), but from using the command-line to run programs, explore the directories of your targets and generally cause a big ruckus. Bonus immersion if you listen to theWipeOut soundtrackwhile you do it.
1. else Heart.Break()
When you start playing this colourful Scandi adventure, you might be forgiven for thinking it’s a slow, ponderous point ‘n’ click with absolutely no direction. But persevere and you’ll find one of the smartest games you’ll ever play. Heart.Break() puts you in the bright green shoes of Sebastian, who has moved to the big city of Dorisburg after landing the job of a soda salesman. You saunter around this strange city selling can after can to cranky citizens, most of whom don’t even want one. As you start out in this brave new world of refreshment, you’ll meet some a group of hacktivists fighting against the monstrous Computer Ministry. Soon you get your own ‘modifier’ - a device that lets you hack any usable object in the game.
