Recent reviews by rush mountmore

every squad got that rich girl who kills you

Best programming game on here. Maybe the only programming game on here that actually feels like programming.

You do not take on each problem in order and write the canonical solution before moving on to the next one. You prioritize different problems based on how important they are to your run. The game lets you pick what you want to focus on, although at certain points it offers some guidance.

Sometimes you will build a naive or greedy solution and then throw money at it to scale it up; sometimes you will write the bare minimum to automate a mechanic and get a little bit of benefit; sometimes you will micro-optimize to shave off as much memory complexity as possible; sometimes you will architect and build a big project with several design patterns.

If you're not familiar with JavaScript, many documentation pages have tutorials and example code you can copy. There are also a few public GitHub repos with game scripts, and the Discord has lots and lots of scripts and code examples. And it's an incremental game, so you won't get "stuck" if your scripts aren't optimal.

Obviously some effort and creativity has been put into this, but it's overall much less polished than other games in the genre. I would recommend Bitburner (if you like writing code) or Grey Hack (if you don't) instead.

Most of the text in the game is LLM generated.

I love a virtual desktop and a virtual terminal, but there isn't a real filesystem or shell, and the command line tools are half-baked. For example, you can't even cat some of the text files that appear in your home directory. That smells vibe coded to me. When you get a chance to write exploits, you actually just click "OK" on a mockup of a text editor with some code that has been written for you, probably also by an LLM. (Maybe that's more realistic than I'd like it to be.)

The tutorialization is overall good - new tools are introduced in a natural-feeling way - but the way the missions are ordered feels like a "worst of both worlds" between linear and sandbox. Maybe this changes after the first couple missions.

The game isn't completely AI slop; points for creativity and personality. At one point you cash out by tipping a sex worker and a twitch streamer tens of thousands of dollars from stolen credit cards. There's a twitter app on the desktop that has people commenting on the bounties/hacks that you do.

I will defend ribbit78 with my life

We're so back

exactly what it looks like. you can probably tell by the promo screenshots whether you'll like it.

it's about 3 hours long (plus an endless mode, but i don't feel like i need to replay it). it felt a little bit like an idler near the end, but there's a fast pacing option that i didn't select. the gameplay is easy and fairly simple, and it's tied to story cues and achievements so as to avoid becoming boring. apart from the slow lategame, progression keeps things interesting, and the unlocks are tutorialized via storytelling, which is done well.

the story and theme are intentionally a little bit over-the-top in a way that helps it feel satirical and not overly preachy/doomer-y. there's a lot of effort put into some of the GUI's, which helps it pull off the 'sitting in front of a computer' aesthetic.

This game rocks. I'm not usually the target audience for this kind of thing, but it has me hooked. I think it's really good at selling you a puzzle roguelite, then feeding you just enough hints to make you want to figure out what's going on.

The puzzles don't really require huge leaps of logic (except for that one room that seems to be everyone's least favorite), but some of them do require you to take notes. I'm finding that extremely rewarding, and it's got me filling up a OneNote with hundreds of notes and screenshots and theories. If taking notes sounds annoying, then you might not find some of the later puzzles interesting. But it felt pretty natural to me - I only found them because I was already curious enough to be taking notes.

One problem that's come up in the postgame is that, because it's a roguelite, sometimes a run just doesn't give you the combination of things you need to make progress toward your next goal. But usually this means that either the run is very short (so I can get into a more interesting one quickly), or it's got me exploring something else.

p good

Devs will ban you from this game if you are gay or trans, which they've stated are "fetishes": https://docs.google.com/document/d/17kBMorbq59Izsu5gYA1B3pQfbyoaG102_p0pEWZx4Hk

Obviously, I have to recommend against this game while their policy is to not allow queer players.

This game is so detailed and well designed. The writing is dramatic but concise and drops enough hints to make me want to go back on a later run and figure out what might have happened if I had a higher stat or a different rank or made a different decision. The combat is very simple but 20+ hours in I'm still figuring out different strategies for different enemies or situations or with different stats or equipment of my own.

A game where you survive until the end takes an hour or two. The progression is very satisfying, like many roguelites, doing well in one run can make your next runs better.

I typically don't care about achievements but they're all interesting enough that I want to go for them (and apparently many others do, since the hardest ones I've gotten still have around 25% of players, or maybe I'm just bad at it)