Posted in: Movies, Recent Updates, Video Games | Tagged: Double Fine, entertainment, Hack 'n Slash, Steam, video games, zelda

Hack 'n Slash Your Way Out Of Puzzles – With A USB Sword?

By Etienne Dubuc

One of the first games I remember liking so much that I didn't want to stop playing is Ocarina of Time. That love for this particular game made me play most of the other Zelda games. I developed an even bigger crush on the top-down perspective iteration of the franchise such as Link to the Past and the Oracles duo.

Since then I have always looked for games feel like a Zelda game without actually being one. There have been a couple over the years, but none that really made an impression on me. But just a couple weeks ago, Double Fine, a studio I'm very fond of, announced Hack 'n Slash a top-down perspective action adventure game, that really, really looked like a Zelda game. To my pleasure it wasn't long until the game was released in early access on Steam.

You play Alice, a little elf, with a sprite companion, who will remind you of Navi right away. As with many Zelda titles, you will start the game by finding a sword, a USB sword. This time though, you will not slay your enemy with it, you will hack the game. Objects such as enemies, doors, blocks and other part of the environment will have USB ports on them so that you can plug yourself in and change their behavior.

If that bird is harassing you, just slash it to make a hack window appear with the values you can change. How about changing his attack speed, the number of hearts you lose if it hits you, or even just making it good instead of evil? So within a predetermined set of functions you can modify the game to make it more welcoming to you.

As you go, you pick up some other artifacts that will help you on your quest and in your hacking ways. The "classic boomerang" will let you hack from a distance and the "third eye hat" will let you see the matrix. Up until this point, the game is making it easy on you. Maybe you have scratched your head a little to pass a puzzle you encountered, but you haven't really faced anything that taunting. It is still a clever Zelda imitation with a little hacking twist here and there for selected objects.

And then it hits you, a new form of puzzle where instead of just giving you selected fields with selected values, you have to actually understand the code and rewrite parts of it yourself to make it out. This is where the game really becomes it's own. As fun as it was before, it was still just an awesome Zelda game without being labeled that way. This is also where the game might lose some players. I have no knowledge of any programming language and those puzzles jumped on my nerves a lot.

You do get some explanation about the basics of each component, but it still appears in an unknown language. So you might end up breaking the game code a couple times, which gives you a kill screen. No worries though, since you can just restart at the beginning of the puzzle before you changed anything in the code. Figuring out which part of the code you must hack may result in a lot of trial and error, which kind of detracts from the fun. Even if everything in the code is based on logic that you can deduce, that logic is sometimes just too gibberish to understand if you don't have the right tools to figure it out.

There is still fun to be had at that point since the puzzles are clever, the art is really beautiful and the dialogue is funny. I still recommend it to every action adventure game lover, but be prepared, if you do not know anything about programming, to curse a little and end up just guessing your way out of puzzles.

Of course, this being an early access game there are bugs and the game happens to crash every now and then for relatively unknown reasons. So if you can't endure a glitchy game, please wait for the official release before playing Hack 'n Slash, just so your experience isn't negatively influenced by bugs that will, in time, be fixed.

Etienne Dubuc is the host of a French radioshow called « Les geeks ont raison » and program director for CISM 89,3FM in Montreal. You can follow him @geeksontraison

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