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.

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, a...