868-HACK was the archetypal "broughlike". It condensed key elements of traditional roguelikes (such as the original "hack") to a constrained concentrated form of tactical movement and judicious resource use on a 6x6 grid. This sequel, released in May 2026, starts from that tight pearl of a design, repeated here almost unmodified, but builds a strategic layer on top with dense connections to that base, resulting in a much deeper and more replayable whole.
Many roguelikes feature an "overmap", as in ADOM, Angband, Omega, or Qud, which you travel across to choose which dungeon or town to handle next. BACK adds something similar, which with its Neuromantic cyberpunk theme becomes a network map where you choose which server from an expanding range of possibilities to hack next. After 15 iterations or 3ish deaths, it's game over, and your total score goes on the leaderboard. This is still primarily a high-score game, with your main goal being to make and take opportunities to get points, always with some risk associated. The strategy comes in judging the right level of risk and finding ways to mitigate it. Every server gives you a power-up "device" to use on that and future servers, as well as opportunities to gain resources which survive to the next server. Valuable servers offer more score and better devices, but sport bevies of game-changing modifiers which can drastically increase the difficulty.
That's the abstract design, which is sound but not strikingly original. The concrete instantiation is delightful, funny, and very evil. Some of my favourite evils:
Cyberpunk, with some themes which should be familiar to anyone who's read Doctorow or paid attention. Unified megacorp have bought up the rights to your mother's burrito recipe, and you don't have a licence. The hackers work for the megacorps when they should be manifesting the Trickster archetype. Artificial life is taking over the network and mesmerising the public. If there's hope, it probably isn't in a hacker like you, but you can try anyway.
The setting and message are weaved through the game in a mostly subtle and always effective way. If I worked for a megacorp, it would probably make me wonder why.
The game keeps track not just of your highest score (mine is 6583), but also of the average of your last 10 games. This is a trick I've seen previously only in Brough's "P1 Select", but I've come to see it as crucial for a game of this sort (and have added it to the latest version of my own broughlike "Fear of View"). Roguelikes are all about making do with what the RNG gives you, accepting that you won't always have your favourite or the most powerful things, and being forced to find creative ways to make use of what you have. This is a large part of what keeps such games fresh in the long term. Aiming only for highscore, however, incentivises restarting or taking excessive risks in games which do not turn out optimally at first, which narrows the space of games you do play to completion to those in which you get the best start. Taking average score forces you to take every game seriously, and make the best of bad situations.
It's a tough game, for sure. More forgiving than its predecessor in some ways -- resources are more abundant, many devices give you serious advantages, and you have a few spare lives -- but more sadistic in others. The beauty of a high-score game is that difficulty is set by the player. Higher scores can be achieved by taking more risks and missing out on opportunities to make the game easier. One particularly neat incarnation of this is the "masterplan" devices which can only be obtained by hacking your way through a megacorp's four servers. Most devices help the player survive, but these instead help you get points. Aiming to get and use them early seems to be key to getting a seriously high score, but makes the game much harder.
My only complaint is that for the last few servers in a game, I often find I have enough useful devices to approximately max out my scores without real danger. But this may be because I'm still not playing riskily enough early on.
The game is written in Godot, is DRM-free, and can be run without an internet connection. However, it has some Steam integration. My experiments show that if ~/.steam/ exists, it will attempt to connect to Steam's servers, and freeze if you are sensible enough to sandbox and deny network access to non-free software. I suppose Steam is used for shared highscore tables. These seem like a bad idea to me -- it's easy to savescum, and I imagine (uninformedly) that it isn't too hard to get around whatever countermeasures Steam might employ, so I wouldn't trust any global highscores -- and certainly not worth surrendering independence to Valve Megacorp for. But the game runs fine if ~/.steam/ is eliminated, and still keeps local highscores, so I'm willing to forgive.
A seriously excellent game.
868-BACK