868-Back is the sequel to 868-Hack, a compact and thinky roguelike from one of the best developers working in the genre, and it's playable for the first time now in a new demo on Steam. The latest Steam Next Fest is running from now through Monday, March 2nd, and all sorts of upcoming games are available to preview and try out. Here's the new trailer for the 868-Back demo:
Sporting a grungy, messy, mixed-up-pixels aesthetic, the new 868 throws you back into the computer hacking game after a long time retired from the scene. Those greedy corpos will probably never stop their amoral exploitation, so we'll always need experts like you to come in under the radar and firewalls to expose them.
Michael Brough is pretty much a famous name in the game design world, and the original 868-Hack is one of his classics. Like many of his very tight and pressurized little roguelikes, it traps you in small grid stages with lots of enemies (6x6 in this case) and forces you to learn tactics to get yourself out of tight spots. Viruses, walls and valuable data are all around you, and extracting what you can while using special programs you might come across to your advantage is the name of the game.
The new sequel picks up right where the old one left off, with the general layout and premise feeling very familiar. The demo contains a tutorial to help anyone get started if these crunchy little roguelikes (often called broughlikes) are new for them, and a couple steps into this I was being taught about some of the new layers this time around: "devices" are new modifiers on your gameplay that can make you more powerful in specific situations (think of artifacts from Slay the Spire) and "scrips" are one-time-use copies of program abilities.
Even on their own, just these first basic additions to the scope surely have the potential to magnify and multiply the strategic thinking going on in any given run, and I have no doubt whatsoever that there will be new secret layers waiting to be uncovered as you progress deeper into the recesses of the game. Discovery has always been at the heart of Brough's designs.
The current Steam Next Fest runs until Monday March 2nd, and I don't know if the 868-Back demo will still be available after that point, but you can definitely play up to then on Steam. We look forward to news about a release date for the game, hopefully coming later this year.
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