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.