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Quadrilateral Cowboy, the cyberpunk heist game that wants to hack your heart, is out July 25

Quadrilateral Cowboy

Brendon Chung has a string of excellent, idiosyncratic games behind him – from the short-form first-person cinema of Thirty Flights of Loving to Flotilla’s Frozen Synapse in space. 

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Quadrilateral Cowboy looks to combine both of those halves into a first-person cyberpunk heist adventure that requires plenty of thinking and a small amount of actual coding. It’s coming out next week.

Set in the same universe as Thirty Flights of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy shares its blocky aesthetic, but here you take on the role of a hacker in the ‘80s. Answering only to the highest bidder, armed with a 56.6k modem and a “staggering” 256k RAM, you infiltrate buildings to steal documents.

Different agents have different abilities – to break down doors or climb quickly through levels – but all share a capacity for coding their way around problems. Cameras, locked doors, extra security: all can be bypassed by pulling out your in-game keyboard and typing in, for instance, ‘cam8.off(3)’. That’ll disable a camera for three seconds, long enough to sneak past but no so long as to set off the alarms.

Basically, if you’ve ever complained about hacking turrets via pipe minigames, this is for you. It’s out on Windows on July 25, with OS X and Linux versions to come sometime in September. Fancy it?