CTRL Phreak

After eagerly waiting for what felt like years, CTRL Phreak's release is everything it promised to be. There are times in the game where you can just juggernaut through small areas by key-spamming and pressing enter, but there are really intriguing boss fights that will punish you for not taking your time, making sure to fill up the bars on certain hostiles, and choosing when to take breaks to focus on filling up green bars. For $7.50 (AUD) this game is an absolute steal, incredibly excited to continue playing and getting the rest of the achievements.

I have waited a long time for this game and almost forgot about it. I was very excited to see it released, but deep down I was sceptical, believing that a game based on 'just mashing keys' would not amount to more than a gimmick. The reality is far better than I expected. This game takes a very fun and 'silly' mechanic and makes it really work. It starts out simple but progresses at a steady, balanced rate, allowing you to figure out the more subtle elements of gameplay as you progress. While there were several points where I felt like I had no idea what was going on (I was just mashing keys and pressing tab to frantically switch between all the enemies), I quickly learned that there is a lot of thought behind choosing which enemy to attack at any given moment, which threats to manage vs which to focus on neutralising early on, etc. There is a surprising and satisfying amount of nuance to the gameplay, and you will quickly find yourself going from "haha look at me I'm a movie hacker" to "yeah that's right, I'm a [i]hacker[/i] now". Well worth the tiny price tag.

IM IN There's a lot more strategy than keysmashing to complete each level, and bosses are especially fun and challenging to take on. I was elated to see other minigames included in hacking such as phising (where you actually do a fishing minigame) and snake. I only wish I could pause my progress in a run, otherwise this is an incredibly fun game for 6$ CAD

EDIT: The dev responded to this feedback near immediately, and the game is better for it. For that act alone I can confidently recommend this. The game's charming, the dev's a good sport, and clearly cares about their work. Original review left below, struck through. [strike] The game is aesthetically well put together, and really fun to play. It even has a fishing minigame, making it officially a Real Video Game. But I can't recommend it in its current state. [/strike] [strike] The mechanics are poorly taught to the player, with entire vital systems just not mentioned. What does that RAM symbol do or mean? What are those dots next to your keywords? What are alt+k and alt+i? The game certainly isn't going to tell you.[/strike] [strike] If the dev does a pass on the tutorialization and how the game state is communicated to the player then I'll gladly turn this to a thumbs up. I just can't justify doing that right now.[/strike]

learned more about computer science than in my first year of university

It really nails the feel of being a super hacker like on TV, i just wish I could run it on linux. I use arch, btw. EDIT: holy smokes, it runs on linux now! Very cool. I'm running it on arch, btw.

Have been waiting for this game since i saw a snippet of ot on TikTok a few years ago, and honestly it's just as fun as was promised! However, gonna stop playing until a save option will be added cuz like.... c'mon, i get that the "battles" are quite short, but "save" option is usually added before the game releases, and not after... And not all people have time or patience to play a whole game in one go

Love this game, very unique and feels great to [strike] destroy my keyboard [/strike] experience the gameplay. bosses are fun, the only real complaint I have is the Auto complete when I hit space did not seem to be working fully? I'm probably just doing it wrong though. Definitely pick up this game, there are far worse things to spend 5$ on.

This is an extremely polished, stylish, and fun game! My hands hurt and I LIKE IT! The game maintains very consistent thematic design throughout while still being silly and tongue-in-cheek. The main gameplay loop is actually similar to many rogue-lites in that you dive into various layers of the Web and essentially have random encounters that reward your with money or RAM (increased hack power). Interspersed throughout the layers are fun little minigames that are a very welcome reprieve from the mad typing of combat; as well as shops and secret encounters that give you different rewards. Combat is achieved by mashing the keyboard to "charge up" keywords, which can then be typed (manually or via auto-complete) to do big multiplicative damage or create other effects like multi-hits. It's immensely satisfying taking on a very difficult encounter and chaining keywords together and taking out several enemies at once. My sole complaint (really more a suggestion) is that it is sometimes kind of difficult to know what you are targeting when taking on more than 2 or 3 enemies, especially if enemies die and shift around. Enemies have a health bar, a red attack bar, and sometimes a purple stun bar and each of these can be targeted and switched between using Tab. The border of the targeted bar is highlighted slightly brighter than the others but this is often hard to parse in more chaotic encounters. It might be helpful to have it be more obvious what part of the enemy you are targeting, perhaps by having a reticle overlayed. Nonetheless, the game is still more than playable and extremely fun and addictive. I highly recommend buying this game and supporting this developer!

Super fun. Makes you feel like you're a "fake tv hacker"