Quadrilateral Cowboy’s Heist Puzzles Are Really About Sitting Alone With a Manual

Quadrilateral Cowboy asks you to hack a building with a keyboard, and it makes that sound like the most natural thing in the world. Blendo Games released the first-person puzzle-adventure on July 25, 2016, for Microsoft Windows, then brought it to macOS and Linux on October 1, 2016. It is a single-player game set in a cyberpunk 1980s, and it is very good.

Trailer, via Blendo Games.

A 56.6k Modem and 256k of RAM

You play a computer hacker. Your kit is a “top-of-the-line hacking deck outfitted with a 56.6k modem and a staggering 256k RAM,” and the game never lets you forget how modest that is. The setting is the 1980s, dressed in cyberpunk, and the tone stays dry about the hardware.

The work is heists. You oversee one or more agents who infiltrate buildings and steal documents. Each agent brings a different ability. One carries a saw to break through doors. Another climbs and moves quickly through levels. You watch what they see through virtual reality goggles that relay the feed back to your hacker.

Then the security shows up: locked doors, cameras, alarms. You do not shoot them. You write programs.

cam8.off(3)

The central mechanic is code, typed on a physical keyboard. When an agent meets a camera or a lock, you write a small program that manipulates the security feature without setting off additional alarms. An early preview showed the line cam8.off(3), which disables Camera 8 for three seconds. Leave it off longer and a security alert fires.

That is the whole tension of Quadrilateral Cowboy in one instruction. You are not solving a puzzle by finding the right object. You are solving it by writing the right program with the right timing, then watching an agent walk through the gap you made.

Later gadgets join the kit, including a rover that scouts and collects objects. The rover can be programmed too. The heists themselves are planned out in a virtual reality space, which gives the game a second layer: the rehearsal before the job.

Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving

Brendon Chung is the sole developer behind Blendo Games, and Quadrilateral Cowboy sits in the same universe as his earlier games, Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving. It shares their “blocky” aesthetics. That lineage matters more than it sounds. Chung has spent years building small, strange games with a distinct look, and this one is the largest of them.

It took four years to develop. Chung built it on a modified version of the Id Tech 4 engine, which is an old id Software technology pressed into service for a game about typing commands at cameras.

The result is a first-person game where the first person is not a soldier. It is a person at a desk, watching other people do the dangerous part.

What the Four Years Bought

This is where Quadrilateral Cowboy earns its reputation. The game could have been a gimmick about typing, and instead it is a game about planning. The agents have abilities. The security has rules. The programs have durations. Every heist becomes a scheduling problem, and the pleasure is in the schedule holding.

The virtual reality goggles are the smartest piece of the design. They let the game show you the agents’ view without pretending you are the agent. You are the hacker. You are remote. The distance is the point.

The 1980s cyberpunk frame is not decoration either. A 56.6k modem and 256k of RAM are funny numbers, but they also explain why the hacking looks like this: text, timing, small commands, no spectacle. The hardware is the constraint, and the constraint is the game.

A Schedule You Have to Keep

The heists run on timing, so here is the shape of a typical job as the game lays it out.

the player, as the hacker, will have to create a program – typing this as code on their physical keyboards – that manipulates the security features without setting off additional alarms to allow the agents to sneak by

That is the loop, and the game trusts you to hold all of it in your head at once.

What the Score Reflects

Quadrilateral Cowboy earned “generally favorable” reviews on Metacritic and collected a number of indie game accolades, including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The critical aggregate sits at 8.4 out of 10 across 13 outlets, and that number is about right.

What matters here is not the code. Plenty of games have used fake terminals. What matters is that Blendo Games made the code the verb. You do not press a button to disable a camera. You write the sentence that disables the camera, and you live with how long you left it off.

The weaker part is the friction. Typing is slower than pressing, and a heist that goes wrong because of a typo is not a thrilling failure. It is a clerical one. The game mostly avoids this by keeping programs short, but the risk is always there.

The stronger part is the restraint. Four years, a modified Id Tech 4 engine, blocky visuals, and a hacker who never leaves the desk. Chung built a heist game where the most exciting thing on screen is a line of text with a timer attached. That it works at all is an achievement. That it works this cleanly is why it still gets named among the best indie games of its year.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a puzzle game about preparation, and preparation is not usually fun to watch. Here it is. 8.4 of 10.

Blendo Games · Brendon Chung · cyberpunk · Indie Games · puzzle games · Quadrilateral Cowboy