This can be frustrating at the beginning when you’ve got a bare-bones deck and desperately need money, because there’s no easy way to grind for the credits you’ll need to buy hacking programs. Every network is fine-tuned to offer a specific flavor of challenge or an intriguing bit of world detail, including small choices that the game keeps track of, sometimes by increasing your “white hat” (idealistic) or “black hat” (selfishly criminal) reputation, and sometimes through emails from your clients or conversations with Snail and Clover. It’s an experience with absolutely zero filler. Moving between the nodes even feels a bit like the puzzles of Hitman Go, as you’re trying to reach the right targets in the right order while a network trace bar gradually fills up.īut Midnight Protocol synthesizes these elements into something that’s minimalist yet incredibly polished - imagine the story of your favorite sci-fi RPG was set inside its hacking mini-game. Shadowrun Returns features turn-based RPG virtual combat.
The node system is reminiscent of Uplink, while the faux command line conceit was used in Hacknet and Quadrilateral Cowboy. That’s fair, and there are plenty of other potential comparisons as well. I dropped a link to Midnight Protocol in The Verge’s Slack gaming channel soon after I started playing, and it drew immediate comparisons to the hacking sections from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Networks are fine-tuned for different styles of challenge
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The key to progression is completing jobs that unlock new programs through a reputation system, looking at reports about what’s on a given network, and picking a loadout of software that will let you tackle it. In its default mode, each turn gives you two actions before the network responds to your moves.īetween network heists, players have access to a black market of hacking programs and hardware upgrades, which can be purchased with credits siphoned from computer networks. Your goal is to complete a task - like acquiring a file or installing a virus - using a keyboard-only interface for jumping across nodes, deploying hacking tools, and allocating power between different programs. Addresses lead to levels composed of interconnected nodes with different functions. The meat of the game, however, lies behind a list of network addresses sent by other characters. Much of Midnight Protocol’s story plays out over simulated emails, chat sessions, and a small searchable data bank. But the writing stays admirably restrained, surgically paring down stock genre plots and using passing references and terse messages to build its characters’ histories. The longer you play, the more the game delves into its sci-fi premise and even the conceit of its fake desktop interface.
Your protagonist is fundamentally a futuristic version of the private investigator who’s stumbled on a dangerous secret that could get them killed. But you’re also hunting down the person who leaked information about you online, and as you uncover their identity, you realize there’s something troubling afoot.ĭeveloper LuGus Studios draws on the cyberpunk genre’s hardboiled roots rather than reaching for elaborate worldbuilding, heavy-handed commentary, or retro-futuristic nostalgia. At first you’re simply trying to get back on your feet, taking small jobs from your veteran fixer Snail with some help from a young, morally conflicted partner named Clover. When you log into its slightly airspace-looking simulated computer desktop, you’ll learn that your pseudonym is Data, and you’re a master hacker who just narrowly avoided imprisonment.
Midnight Protocol is noir cyber-crime by way of turn-based roleplaying games and spatial puzzles. But it’s one of the best iterations of that formula I’ve seen: mechanically elegant, narratively economical, and crafted with care. Released last month by Iceberg Interactive, it joins a glut of cyberpunk games from the past couple of years, and it doesn’t add any single standout innovation to a pretty familiar formula. Video games have taught me that hacking mainly involves two things: capturing little computer-shaped nodes and typing in a command line.