Hacking Game Quadrilateral Cowboy Is a Bit Messy, But You Won’t Forget It

Playing Quadrilateral Cowboy, you spend much of your time in a cramped, darkened hideout. As one of three members of Impala Solutions, an independent contractor specializing in corporate theft and data retrieval, this is your home base, a cozy clubhouse from which to program, hack, and scheme. It's a mess. Spare computer parts line the shelves next to silent radios, moldering books, and dead television sets. A turned-over hoverbike rests against some of your better machines, and one of your two partners at Impala will occasionally tinker with it, sparks clattering against the wood paneling.

Like its subjects, Blendo Games' new PC puzzler Quadrilateral Cowboy is unafraid to be messy. It's a puzzle game that doesn't feel like one, a narrative game without a single speaking role. Taking place in a William Gibson-esque dreamscape, it puts you in the role of a slick hacker armed with clunky tech. You build elaborate worlds and pull them apart, all from behind a laptop the size of a suitcase. It's a high-tech fantasy topping out at 256 kilobytes of RAM.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is brief and focused, sometimes to the point of feeling confining. It's both thrilling and routine, a snapshot of a career living on the fringes. Days after finishing it, the game lingers with me like a flavor on my tongue.

Most of your time in Quadrilateral Cowboy is going to be spent in something called the HeistPlanner, a computer program designed by our protagonists to simulate worlds and (yes) plan heists. How do we get in? How do we get what we came for? How do we get out? At your disposal is an ever-growing array of anachronistic and fanciful gadgets.