Things I Played: Quadrilateral Cowboy - A Whimsical Hackathon

When somebody mentions programming to me, the first thing that springs to mind is the image of an quirky start-up. I’m sure you can picture the scene: girls in colourful dresses, guys with black t-shirts, a pungent smell of coffee lingering in the air, and even the odd ping-pong table for those quieter moments. It’s official, programming is now cool (I think) but it wasn’t always this way. Wargames and Hackers once tried hard to portray hacking with an air of youth rebellion because until recently it was way more likely to be considered a strange bedroom hobby than a trendy career option.

Quadrilateral Cowboy, the new game from one-man game programming machine Blendo Games aka Brendon Chung, reminds me of this. It’s a retro-futuristic hacking-fest about raiding stock exchanges, stealing safes, but most importantly, about having fun with friends. Set in 1979, it harks back to a world filled with technological clunkiness; a time when phones didn’t fit in our pockets and laptops didn’t have all the elegant contours of an Apple Macbook Pro X 7. It revels in retro-computing, offering a curious mix of influences from cool cyberpunk, to new wave cinema, through to sexy spy fiction.

The game revolves around your deck. This is a weighty portable computer that's able to be plonked down and used to connect to things inside the network. It has an MS-Dos style interface which can be used to hack into things with the overall purpose being to manipulate the environment into a series of Ocean’s Eleven-esque heists. To do this, you parse through coding instructions. An example includes “door1.open(3)”, which translates into getting Door 1 to open for 3 seconds. Another is “connect nell video1”, which hooks a little robot dog up to your CCTV system. Eventually you start stringing a lot these codes together with the intention being to get in and get out without alerting the security system as to your whereabouts.

Repeat after me. In. And. Out.

Anybody familiar with Blendo Games’ previous titles’ such as Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving will already know Chung’s signature style well. It's unique here too with bright and colourful aesthetics that exude a sort of comic book tone. The plot plays out a lot like this too. Rather than a cohesive whole, it’s told through vignettes, rather like individual panels. Moments of exposition are broken by jump-cuts with atypical opera music and other assorted quirky moments. These elements are mix together to tell a story that’s charming but simply: about three female hackers, who arise each morning, throw on their cutesy outfits and get down to work by stealing money in virtual conquests.

Fortunately, a mastery in coding isn’t required to tackle Quadrilateral Cowboy as it does a great job of introducing mechanics systematically. Alongside your deck, you’re introduced each mission to a series curious gadgets including a robotic dog called Nell, a rifle hidden in a suitcase, and a launcher similar to the much-coveted launch-pad in Quake 3. When it all gets going, it works remarkably well, so much that even as somebody with almost no computing talents, I was able to feel like a master hacker in less than an hour.  Scratch that. A bad-ass hacker, in fact.

Leaving my computer brought me back down to reality a bit but I felt Quadrilateral Cowboy proved to be an incredible joy overall. Aside from the occasional bug, all of the levels prove astoundingly well-designed, with the penultimate mission - a wonderfully constructed raid on a stock exchange set aboard a mechanised zeppelin - being the best of all. This type of situation sums the game up well. It revels in eccentricity, telling stories in moments like polaroid photography. It’s lean but strips back all the fat and presents a game free from the typical baggage of AAA titles. Risky. Creative. Fun.

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