A hacking-sim roguelike · plays in the browser
Break the ICE. Drain the cache. Get out before the trace finds you.
You fit a cyberdeck that never has enough memory, pick a target, and run it. Every raid feeds the next one in an unbroken chain that ends when you bank it or die holding it. Thirteen graphics eras, from a teletype printing in dashes to something 1984 would have called photoreal — and the upgrade is the plot, not the packaging.
STATUS — IN DEVELOPMENT. The prototype has been played end to end; the public build is not hosted yet. There is nothing to install, nothing to pre-order, and no email to leave. Come back, or read on.
Trace is not a clock. At 31 trace, every single thing you do has a 31% chance of being the action that gets you seen.
One raid
Fit, engage, disconnect.
A raid is one target. A run is the chain of raids until you die or retire, and the run total is your score. The whole game happens in three moves.
Fit the deck
Free. No clock, no trace, nothing shooting. You load warez off the rack into the memory bus and the memory runs out before your wishlist does.
Engage
Now the clock runs and the trace climbs. You target layers of ICE, fire breakers at them, and hold a Siphon on the cache to pull data out.
Disconnect
Cargo banks only if you leave under your own power. Traced or burned out, you lose the haul and the run with it.
The squeeze
Memory is the scarce resource, and it always was.
A Mark I deck gives you six memory and one core. A Crowbar for Barriers costs two. A Solvent for Wards costs three. A Spike for Sentries costs three. The Siphon that actually earns you anything costs three.
You cannot carry a breaker for everything and still carry the Siphon. That is not a balance problem waiting to be patched out. That is the game. Every raid asks what you are prepared to be unable to answer, and every decision you make afterwards comes back to it.
Barrier blocks extraction
It never shoots at you. It simply means no income until it falls — the cheapest layer to ignore and the most expensive to leave standing.
Ward disrupts the Siphon
Heavy hits, and it keeps knocking your mining offline. Wards are an income wall that fights back.
Sentry burns trace
Light damage, but every hit that lands drives your trace up. A Sentry does not kill you. It shortens your whole run.
The eras
Thirteen ways to look at the same net.
The first campaign is a teletype — one colour, rules made of dashes, bars made of hashes. Finish it and the next one runs on glass. Then amber phosphor, then a vector tube, then grey bevelled chrome, then a desktop, then metal, then frosted dark, then polygons, then a lit world. Thirteen renderers over the same game.
The picture does not improve because you earned a prettier skin. It improves because the thing on the other end of the line can afford better, and it can afford better because of what you keep doing for it.
The world
Five of the companies in this game have real websites.
Cybrscape sells the decks. Nitrosoft sells against them. There is a gallery, a non-profit, and the company that builds the physical racks the net actually runs on. All five have product pages, spec sheets and job listings, and all five are fiction — part of the game, not a business. If you arrived here because you found one of them and wondered, that page is the answer.