NOCLIP Pocket E97 - Future Retroism - Quadrilateral Cowboy

Podcast.Mystery(1); wait(31) Welcome back to the podcast, and to, shamefully, our first episode of Mystery May! Quadrilateral Cowboy is a part heist, part desktop simulation game in which you use a portable “deck” to hack into security systems and use gadgets to get into locations in a cyberpunk dystopia. And the thing that really sets this game apart from most other games in this genre is that you actually have to do all the hacking yourself. It’s not quite complicated on the level of something like Hacker Evolution, but the act of creating code yourself and then needing to execute actions in sync with it creates a really creatively expressive environment in which to solve puzzles. The game may add a few more things than were strictly necessary to be a satisfying collection of systems, but each of them is fun to play around with and get a hang of. On top of the strictly mechanical elements of the game, the game builds its world, one of skyscrapers and autoturrets, bombastically while setting up its characters in an exceedingly subtle way. The minimalist art style and lack of any dialogue betray how well the narrative elements are communicated by way of environments, character behaviors and gameplay setup. This is one of those games that, while definitely not being for everyone, shows how games can be used to communicate weirder concepts in ways few other mediums can. We’re going to be talking about how the crunchy mechanics are used to design novel puzzle concepts, issues we had both technical and skill, and we set you up with a DC 17 vibe check. Thank you for joining us again this week! We know it’s been a long time coming on Mystery May, so much so that it is now June (“Mystery Summer Theater” as Andy has taken to calling it), but appropriately, this game has been on our list to play for seven years so it’s been a long time coming as well. Are you a fan of really finnicky mechanic sets like this, or did you look once at this game and say “maybe I’ll play the next one”? Let us know in the comments section or over on our Discord! Next time, Mystery May gives us one of the most “thing that’s not like the others” games on the list with Ecco the Dolphin, so we hope you’ll join us then, or the suffering will almost definitely not have been worth it.