CHAQS

The creator is toxic and has several issues. Was improperly banned from the steam discussions about this game and then followed by a rude and cynical comment from one of the developers for simply politely asking a question. The game has some promise, but other games like Sylvarcon are BY FAR better. Sylvarcon actually uses a full VM and Kali linux distro in the game to learn and use. This one uses fake commands, is vague, and when you ask for clarification one of the developers acts like a child. I cannot recommend purchasing or supporting a game from a company that acts with such disregard for it's players. There are by far better hacking game out there. I suggest supporting them and not giving this developer your money. Specifically the developer and moderator of the steam discussions on this game "mert.senel" was beyond rude. Normally I love indy games and support indy studios, can't do that here though. To add, upon reading this review that same developer shut down my access to a game I bought and paid for. To be clear, because of his attitude I had my game STOLEN from me after I purchased it. The developer is toxic and will steal your money if he chooses to. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME! The developer will steal your money if they choose to. Also, the game constantly listens to you, no telling what they're doing with that data right?! The developer has to date NOT offered any refund of any kind. His statement here is to look good for the public. I politely asked questions in the forums the developer did NOT have to respond to at all. This is common practice on steam. To be clear, this developer STOLE MY MONEY AND GAME because they were insulted i had issues with their game! This is against steam terms of service and the developer should be permanently banned from selling games on steam. Getting "a key" would do no good as my steam account is banned in game. So as long as the developer has a ban, I cannot play a game I PAID MONEY FOR AND OWNED. This is the same as a developer coming into your home and stealing your physical game because of a comment you left on a YouTube video. That sound like someone you want to give your money to? I would not. There are better hacking games on steam to be sure. Also, if you look at every negative review, its appears in the developer responses, they shut down and remove access to anyone who leaves a negative review of this game. To make sure this is clear, the developer has a pattern of stealing games that are paid for if a person leaves a negative review. Look at the responses yourself and see! Could you imagine EA shutting off access to Madden and not refunding any money if someone leaves a negative review? That's theft and against Steam's terms of service. Do NOT buy this game!

Good concept, one of the best hacking games I've tried. The problem is that it switches key names between actual real world commands and in-game commands, making it confusing if you already have a bit of knowledge about hacking, cyber security concepts, network protocols, and for those who don't, it will be very confusing.

My original review was going to be how the game seems like it could be fun and like it was alot of potential but it unfortunately doesnt expand on it. but after seeing how the creator of the game acts, just dont get it. they're a ♥♥♥♥♥ baby who will cry over the slightest thing and ban you from the single player version of the game. The fact that the developer can simply make it so you cant play the offline mode is ♥♥♥♥♥♥, but whats even worse is that it's literally against TOS, nothing in the developer's EULA was broken for these players to be banned, he's just overly sensitive and cant handle criticism in the slightest.

Es un excelente juego, si sabes lo que haces. Si bien, esta traducido al español, la traducción muchas veces esta mal, lo que lleva a confundirte mas. Mas que un juego, es "mini linux", donde tendrás que abrirte camino a través de retos. REPITO y hago énfasis en esto: No es un juego para personas que no tengan nociones básicas en linea de comandos y sistemas de archivos en GNU/Linux!!! Para dar un ejemplo, inicias el juego y debes descifrar la contaseña usando comandos como wget y hash-identifier, desglosando un archivo .jpg. Si no tienes una remota idea de que es un Hash o que hace el comando wget, estarás bastante tiempo. Por el contrario, si tienes conocimientos básicos de desarrollo o bash, te la vas a pasar de puta madre. Yo soy analista de seguridad y termino de trabajar para venir a meterme aquí. XD

I really wanted to like this. I work in information security and have a love of hacker sims going back to Uplink circa 2001. The UI is really clean and immersive, building a full window manager and all of that extra polish had to take years. My gripes are mostly in the minutiae of the shell and edge behaviors. First, let's clarify, this is much more a puzzle game with hacker flavor than a CTF simulation. That's not really clear from the description, and it apparently gets closer to reality the farther you go, seeing things like sqlmap listed as late-game activities. But if you're already pretty advanced in this stuff, it's going to be difficult to muster the enthusiasm to get there when you could just...do an actual CTF instead, often for free. Second, the terminal. The pseudo-OS they've built has some odd behavior with the window manager that really becomes an annoyance. The text selection is finicky, the same command you're typing in persists across all open tabs which kinda defeats the purpose, the tab-autocompletion almost never works (this is a huge gripe), pipes don't work, many common commands (cd, ls, cp, mv for starters) behave differently to UNIX-like shells, and that probably contributes to the puzzle-game feel of it, because I'm not actually in my comfort zone here, I'm using strange things that sometimes resemble what I want to do and sometimes I'm just fighting with their new syntax. The area to get the prompt to be active is very small and switching to it from keyboard is either unintuitive or unavailable. There's also no intuitive system for automating things like iterating over filenames due to the lack of pipe support. Third, the browser is a great idea on paper, but this implementation is pretty horrendous. It doesn't take much mouse input, and doesn't take much keyboard input. I just ended up using the steam overlay's browser instead, and eventually just windowed the game so I could use an actual browser. Fourth, the media player is very spotty on when it wants to play music, causing long periods with no sound. Minor compared to the other things, but I think it hurts the immersion. Fifth, the game is apparently at end of support despite being launched only about 18 months ago, so the four points above are likely to remain valid whenever you happen to read this. All in all I'm not sure what to make of CHAQS. Actually getting started with hacking is probably easier than this game, but being good at this game doesn't get you as far with hacking as spending the same amount of time just learning to hack would. You'll have to unlearn a lot of what the game teaches you because it doesn't function the same way in the real world. You'll learn about some ciphers that you'll never use again. You'll get into steganography which won't have any usage outside of these puzzles. Those things are neat. They're not hacking, they're only vaguely CTF. If you want to get into hacking from nothing, do exactly that. Try your hand at actual CTFs, preferably ones that are guided and start from very little expectations. If you're beginner to intermediate, this is going to give you a fair amount of bad advice. If you're experienced, the differences between this and the real world are probably going to frustrate you more than the enjoyment you get back. For all those reasons, I can't recommend it.

Disappointed After the First Level I felt a bit catfished by this game because everything past the first level feels like a whole different game with significantly poorer quality. The initial level set high expectations, but subsequent levels fail to deliver the same experience. One glaring issue is the unreliable response to TAB keypresses. As someone who frequently uses the TAB key in real terminal environments, this is incredibly frustrating. The TAB key is one of the most used keypresses on a real terminal, at least for me, and its inconsistency here detracts from the immersion and functionality. To be honest, I'd rather just re-play the OverTheWire war games. There, you'll access real servers and run real commands on a real shell, all accompanied by some useful tips. It provides a far more authentic and satisfying experience than what this game offers after its initial level. If you’re looking for a true terminal simulation experience, I’d recommend skipping this game and diving into the OverTheWire war games instead.

The game is quite nice and challenging, but sadly there is hardly anyone active left, not even the creator. Some flags will then be impossible to be captured and just like me you'll be stuck quite quickly...

If you've played most of the hacking sims on Steam, you owe it to yourself to give CHAQS a chance. It leans towards being more realistic rather than "gamified" hacking, though there are some fictional commands and concepts in the game as well. Prior knowledge will absolutely help, regarding both programming and pen-testing. There are 25 challenges in total, and believe me when I tell you that you will be tested more in this game than probably any other. As of this review, less than 1% of the player-base have finished the entire game. Also, the discussion forums are a big help if you get stuck. I try to keep up with the discussions to help as much as I can, so feel free to start a discussion if you get stuck!

First off - shout out to the devs that answered my beginner questions via email. Very fast response times and thorough answers - thank you! They even showed sympathy for my misunderstanding of their preferred syntax and implemented a fix based on my input that accepts additional answers. I would recommend this game to anyone that is on their Linux learning journey. I would say that it is less of an entry-level game and more suited to someone who knows how to navigate linux filesystem, file manipulation like cp/mv/rm/cat, knowing what a string is, and experience with SSH. I have experience with sites like hackthebox and tryhackme, and this seems like a more interactive and gamified version of those sites - which I greatly appreciate and enjoy. Feels like a real OS. I would say that THM and HTB focus on theory, while CHAQs simplifies the theory to focus is on integration and interactivity. Thanks devs! Looking forward to playing more and your future endeavors.

If you like Hacknet or Exapunks but want something with a little more oomph this is the thing