868-Back makes hacking as cool as '90s Hollywood thought it was

So there I am, a regular console cowboy jamming through the hyperfractals of cyberspace, siphoning some choice credits from those lamebrain corpos, when a modem link threw me over to a real nightmare: a webbed out, vibe-coded server from the Basilisk Corp crawling with transmitted viruses. And even worse, they’d managed some hot new dimensional display tech to really make the steal feel real. These megacorps, man. Always find some evil new way to surprise me.

I’m Julia Stiles ranting about the new wave, next wave, and dream wave

Talking about 868-Back, the latest puzzler roguelike from Michael Brough, makes me feel like a parody of what Hollywood used to think hackers are.

With its bizarre visual mishmash of pixel art and notebook doodling and 1980s digital futurism, groovy bass-heavy jams rolling along in the background, text dunked in a vat of cool technobabble, every second of my scrounging through backdoor servers has the air of classic cyberpunk hacking. I’m Hugh Jackman in Swordfish, I’m the Lawnmower Man, I’m Julia Stiles in that one episode of Ghostwriter ranting about the new wave, next wave, and dream wave.

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Pop culture loved to make hacking into the world’s highest security computer systems seem like the easiest (and sexiest) thing in the world, and at a glance 868-Back looks similarly simple. Peek at a few screenshots and you’d be forgiven for thinking beating The System requires little more than clicking around a souped up Minesweeper board. But just as hacking is a bit more complex than the movies make it out to be, I realized hard and fast that Back is a whole lot more than it lets on.

The rules are deceptively simple: taking place on randomly generated 6x6 square grids, you’ve got to turn-based crawl through eight floors of constantly spawning enemies, using a limited resource to snatch weapons, the currency needed to use them, and score points at the same time.The cyberpunk yin-yang is strong though: every item or point gained means instantly spawning more enemies across the already small map, resulting in an endless cavalcade of tricky catch-22s. You need tools to survive, but you’re gonna have to survive to get them, and every button you press, every square you step on, could save or destroy you.

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(Image credit: Michael Brough)

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

It's a game defined by high stakes, one where you’re constantly betraying yourself in acts of digital hubris. Every single run I've failed (and I’ve failed a lot—BACK does not play gentle) has been from me seeing a bunch of points ripe for the taking and knowingly biting off more than I can chew because "yeah, I'm a cool guy, I can probably handle 10 more baddies."

I can almost never handle 10 more baddies.

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For a while this intense single-screen game of tactical maneuvering felt positively claustrophobic, the small arena eliminating downtime and severely limiting my own options. But the more I played, the more I started pushing against BACK’s on-the-surface simplicity, stretching its limitations into all sorts of surprising ways. I was pushing myself and enemies through walls, hopping around the screen like a busted chess piece, and even purposefully calling up that army of foes only to confidently cheat death and make out like a bandit. After a few hours, what once was suffocating had become liberating, that tiny grid of 36 squares now an entire world to play in.

In a way, 868-BACK feels less like any roguelike it visually resembles and more like playing a game of Go—the learning curve not so much from any challenge in the game itself and more from having to rewrite the way you consider playable space.

Back the planet

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

Fans of 2013's 868-Hack will already be intimately familiar with all of this. Everything from that masterpiece of game design—its brilliantly constructed play space and ruleset, its evolving sense of understanding and discovery, its devious temptations to screw yourself over with the promise of a few more points—can be found here in the sequel. But where Hack was spartan—and gosh, 2013 was a long time ago—Back is determined to explode the concept out as far as it can possibly go.

I noticed something was radically different the second I started. Where the original involved hacking through servers and absolutely nothing else, Back turns a run into a more expansive experience with a broader game played out on top of the server crawling, having you uncover and map out a path through various locations you can choose between. On higher levels that aim for score (while you’ll initially be playing just to survive, both 868 games are ultimately oddball high-score chasers), this "world map" and the more involved hacking start feeding into each other in increasingly complex ways. But even before you've gone all Neo and seen through the code, surprises abound to help and hinder you once you dive into a server.

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

'Surprised' definitely described me when I uncovered a new server that seemed innocent enough on the outside, hopped on in, and suddenly found myself… in 3D?

Plenty of roguelikes have embraced large scale modifiers, those typically optional systems that shift everything against you for an extra challenge. Take Slay the Spire’s ascensions, with their ever-expanding enemy buffs forcing you to tighten up your strategy more and more. 868-Hack was no different, offering a host of effects once you’d manage to chain enough successive runs together.

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

868-Back takes the concept to new extremes.

Not only are they more deeply ingrained into the roguelike loop—higher level servers grant score multipliers but also start stacking modifiers against you—nearly every one is dedicated to deeply altering how I play, dozens on dozens of effects forcing me to completely reconsider the space I’d just become confident in.

When I found myself playing in a new dimension, the 6x6 grid now like something out of Wizardry, my overwhelming thought was "Is this even allowed?" When I later got stuck in true Silicon Valley hell, vibed code started stymying my agency while pop-up ads undercut any triumph by forcing me to throw away precious resources. "Is this even possible?" I despaired.

The answer, both times, was somehow yes. I just had to learn how to look at my little cyber-world in a new way, from a different angle. I just had to hack my own brain.

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(Image credit: Michael Brough)

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

(Image credit: Michael Brough)

868-Back feels bottomless. A solid dozen hours in and despite the seemingly simple design of it, there are still mysteries big and small waiting for me (and you, on Steam), still surprises at every corner, still constant moments where what I thought I knew is unraveled and rebuilt in an instant. It’s a marvel, a game that constantly feels like the whole world is insurmountable and like you’re cheat-coding your way past it at the same time.

And best of all, when I’m not failing horribly, it makes me feel like the smartest, coolest (and maybe even sexiest) hacker on planet earth. Gotta love a game that lets me lie to myself like that.