By far the best hacking game I have seen here with some "meta" elements added to it. This game is just as fun even if you don't have a background in cyber security. 10/5 stars

Super fun game. As someone who has basic knowledge into network/cybersecurity and has worked with UNIX terminals before it's immediately comfortable. I'm a bit of a slow learner but I found my rhythm relatively quickly. It does take a bit to get into the groove, I didn't find myself truly enjoying it until I was out of the tutorial and could choose my own missions and it felt more like a job than a learning obligation. Very interesting game design and it felt like more or less a perfect crossroads between simulating the complexity of the technology at hand (even though Naix was right- you're more or less just a script kiddie) and being a cool xD L33T H4XX0R game.

Spoiler: My favorite mission was the pacemaker one. It gave you a background and a lead and basically said "alright, figure it out". It was a super surreal experience testing out a couple things to see if it would stop the heart and when my 3rd try actually worked I felt the real weight of a life on my hands. In contrast, the last lengthy mission with V to uncover Bit's past and everything was cool but it felt like I was getting handheld through the process and it was really annoying having to re-do some hacks (because I had missed some things and had to go back or wanted to double-check one of Bit's many servers) and suddenly encountering "unhackable" places. I didn't mind the slight shift to having to sleuth for passwords but it didn't come at the right time imo.

A couple issues- the node map quickly gets crowded around the end of the game (and isn't really meaningfully sorted), meaning it gets a little annoying to find what you need. When you get to around the last couple missions when you have to visit a lot of nodes it gets kinda cumbersome. This is compounded by the fact that you sometimes have to re-hack nodes if you want to revisit them in case you missed something. Double backing to "double check" a machine already isn't a super pleasant feeling, so if you're digging through a cluster of nodes to find it, just to have to re-execute what could be a pretty lengthy hack just gets kind of frustrating. If there were better organization of nodes or an option to dim the brightness/opacity of nodes I don't really care about at the moment, it would be great. In addition, the graphics are a little messed up. De-selecting fullscreen makes the display expand greater than my monitor size (even though the game resolution matches my monitor resolution).

Otherwise- very fun game. Short length, about 5-8 hours to complete depending on your pace and experience on a terminal. Had a nice time spending my NYE on this one. Cheers!

It's worth every penny