868-HACK

868-HACK is a broughlike strategy game about hacking mainframes and defeating enemies on densely-packed 6x6 grids. Progress from grid to grid, making careful decisions at every moment and avoiding attacks. Discover new abilities and learn their hidden nuances to survive with as many points as possible and carry your discoveries between runs.

In 868-HACK, you control the hacker, a smiley face that moves across the grid, navigating around computers and avoiding enemies. The hacker's facial expression represents its health — from happy to neutral to sad — allowing for only two hits before the run comes to an end. When the hacker attempts to move towards an enemy, it instead attacks, sending a wave of energy that inflicts damage on the enemy.

In each run of 868-HACK, you'll need to make your way through as many grids as you can, collecting resources, new abilities, and points as you go. To do this, you'll use "data siphons", which collect all resources from the tile the hacker is in and any adjacent tiles. This may collect energy and credits from empty tiles, but can also hack adjacent computers to obtain abilities and points. However, every hacked computer unleases a wave of enemies, so deciding which computers to hack and when to do so offers a deep strategic challenge.

The abilities that can be obtained from computers, known as "progs", allow the hacker to get out of tricky situations, at the cost of some energy and credits. Each prog has a short, cryptic description, requiring experimentation to discover all of their intricacies and how best to use them.

868-HACK is a very unforgiving game, requiring careful decisions at every step. One wrong move can put you in an impossible situation and end the run, so planning ahead and discovering esoteric strategies is essential to survival. However, the deeper you get, the more secrets and surprises you'll discover, elevating your hacking skills to the next level.

This description was written by Joseph Mansfield.