Fred Snyder
Played 2024-09-03, IFComp 2024

Have fun hacking very bad security.

I quite enjoyed this! A break-into-the-server thriller with twists and turns, handwavy cyberpunk tech, and light puzzles.

Let's talk about the recurring hacking-themed password puzzle. It gives feedback on your guesses with `+` and `-` symbols, and for me (and probably a lot of people) this immediately summons Wordle or Mastermind. But on my second attempt at the first such puzzle I figured out that they tell you which direction to proceed in the alphabet. “Solving” this gimmick was a genuine moment of pleasure, and I do think it's a clever misdirect.

I think it could have been a bit stronger though, in a few ways.

• For one thing, guesses don't have to be valid words (even though solutions are) so once you've got the gimmick a near-optimal approach is [spoiler]a per-letter binary search. I ended up starting every puzzle with “mmmmmm” or its equivalent[/spoiler] and so solving got very mechanical to the point of being busywork. Limiting guesses to valid words would force me to engage with a nonuniform terrain, making the puzzle more challenging but also more interesting to repeat.
• On that note, the puzzle repeats a few times but even with a different password, once you've got the gimmick it's not really a new challenge. It'd be neat to have more of a new wrinkle each time it appeared (untested ideas: Vigenere-like variant where the alphabet wraps in a different place per-character; an n-grams variant with a longer password; revealing more password to solve as you go, producing time pressure). Or perhaps a *Hadean Lands*-like trick would be thematically appropriate here - once you've solved the first puzzle you've created a tool that automates solving this type of puzzle, and subsequent puzzles wrap or compose the password puzzle in some way. (Not that this is easy to build!)
• I found it comical that this “blockchain” company - a tech interested in what are essentially very difficult passwords - has such a laughably hackable password security system. If anything it's the “blockchain” mention, not the password system, that's out of place in this cyberpunk/80s hacker movie story. This clash might be more glaring to me because I work in software, but also I feel like most people would say “just don't have a password hint system.” It'd preserve the fantasy a little better to reframe what's happening a tiny bit - if you told me the hints are coming from my own kit helping me crack the database encryption key I'd totally accept the handwave.

A later hacking puzzle channels Hunt the Wumpus a bit, which I found charming but not necessarily more interesting or a natural extension of the earlier puzzle.

I also thought the *number* of things to hack in the environment, and the separate `identify` and `hack` verbs, were very effective at creating the fantasy here. It started to create that same sense of depth in the world that Metriod Prime's scanner and visors do. That feeling that a whole other layer of reality is hidden in the world model is *extremely* cyberpunk, and while this isn't an extraordinarily deep or simulationist take on the idea, it was just enough to create the desired effect. Nice work!