The irony, of course, is that while Hack n' Slash might pretend to resist your manipulations, it not only wants you to hack it it demands it. are actually putting stuff in their code to prevent or detect hackers, so the natural endgame here is the game fighting against you as you're trying to hack it.” “The developers who actively participate in that. “Hackers are playing a different game, which is: 'Can I hack the developer?'” says Dillon. “Once hearts don't mean anything, where do we go from there? The game has to become about something else.”ĭillon hints that later in the game, the player will have to battle-or more likely, circumvent-something very much like DRM. “One of the joys of having a game where you can hack everything is that you can break all of the basic mechanics that you're used to in a game like this,” says Dillon. “We could hold this button down for days.” Briefly, I wonder what the point of the game is if you can't die anymore, but then I realize that is the point. When I ask him what the limit is, he shakes his head. I watch as Dillon increases it from three hearts to ten, then fifty, then a hundred and climbing. In Zelda language, it's how many hearts you can have.) (He tells me this is a “global variable” in programming terms. In one room, opening a treasure chest yields an “artifact” that controls the maximum health of your character.

The sheer openness and transparency of the game can take a moment to fully comprehend, particularly if you're accustomed to playing by the rules. This isn't a superficial manipulation, either when you use your sword to change the code of the game, you actually change the code of the game. Does a bridge need to be longer in order to reach across a chasm? Head into the room that controls it and change the “data crystal” that controls the number of tiles. Manipulating other variables in the game allows you to slow down time, change the way characters move and even hack into your own character to change how you look and behave. Where most games like this use code to emulate combat, Hack 'n' Slash uses combat to emulate code. It's a fascinating inversion of the traditional Zelda adventure-not just conceptually, but on the most basic, mechanical level. The puzzles are designed to demonstrate the pleasure of digging down into the code and finding clever ways to turn the traditional rules of an adventure game on their head. It's not a way of cheating your way to a solution-it is the solution. Faced with a hulking, brutish guard brandishing a spear, you can't damage him physically, but you can disarm him by sneaking up behind him, swinging your USB sword, and changing the value of his 'damage' variable to zero.Īlthough this sort of code manipulation is usually seen as breaking the rules of videogames, Hack 'n' Slash makes it fundamental to the game. (Bob shows up later in Hack n Slash as well, as a sprite similar to Navi from The Legend of Zelda.) It's also a shoutout to Alice in Wonderland, a story whose main character demonstrates the sort of “cleverness and bravery in the face of the the universe's essential weirdness” that Dillon wanted to demonstrate in his own protagonist.Īs Alice, you win not by defeating enemies through traditional combat, but by finding elegant or ingenious ways to negotiate the world around you by altering the code that defines it. It's partly a reference to Applied Cryptography, a seminal hacker book that often illustrated its ideas through parables about characters named Alice and Bob. The hero of Hack 'n' Slash, which is available now for $20 on PC, Mac and Linux, is an elf named Alice.

One key modification game hacker