izigame.me

This is an extremely fun game, don't get me wrong, but I have two very major issues with it (especially the second one) that have prompted me to leave a negative review. I very rarely review games on Steam, and only review the ones about which I am most passionately moved, positively or negatively. In this case, negatively. In contrast to my usual, I have enabled comments on this review -- feel free to state your feedback, whether you agree with me or not, just please remain respectful to me, the developers, other commenters, and anyone else as applicable.
There's a "TL;DR" at the end if you're lazy.
I'll start positive. This game is crazy fun. It is probably the funnest hacking-themed game I've ever played, and I've played a lot of them. It was fun and helpful to see some things I recognize from real life, such as the default system port numbers being accurate and the existence of a few UNIX commands (my main OS has been FreeBSD for years, and my experience with UNIX helped with the gameplay in a way that felt good). I liked seeing the C# source code and realizing it was actual, real C# source code that would probably work if the LESS_THAN was properly changed to a "<" sign, etc (C# is my main dev language, always a plus to see it referenced in a game at all). That was cool, and I'll probably compile it later to have that tool on my PC for real (don't comment about the related real life security to this -- I assure you I already know, and it's just for fun). The pacing was really good, and I got hooked fast. So fast that I immediately bought the DLC, soundtrack, and DLC soundtrack for myself, then bought the game and DLC for both my wife and her boyfriend also. Despite my negative review, I don't regret this decision at all, it's a very, very fun game. Oh, the event thing that I can't discuss without giving spoilers, but well, the one where you need to get that thing back, that was super fun! (Unimportant to the review and a spoiler:) I instinctively jumped to my host and forkbombed, apparently I was supposed to kill his forkbomb instead, oh well... I had already made a backup of that file just in case. But anyway, the game was extremely fun, looks great, the music is great, and I'm excited to keep playing and see where things take me.
But there are two issues which were severe enough that they prompted me to leave a negative review despite all this.
The first issue isn't so bad and is easily rectified: This game is the pinnacle of Hollywood-style hacking. It does it very well, and it references real hacking concepts in the game's flavor text and other areas. Some tools are named the same as real ones, and you will probably learn a few real UNIX system port numbers, but that's about where the realism ends. Oh, and this wouldn't bother me in the slightest -- I love Hollywood-style hacking sim games! -- but it clearly says this in the "Features" section in the game's Steam page description, which to me is blatant false advertisement:

Real Hacking
Based on actual UNIX commands, Hacknet focuses on real hacking, not the Hollywood-style version of it.

If I stated what I consider my qualifications for knowing what constitutes "Hollywood-style" hacking, nobody would believe me, so I won't. But even if you have never seen either a vtty or Hackers, I feel like anyone looking at the animation for the command called "porthack", god and the command name itself, and how it works, and everything related to the actual process of hacking (kinda the core concept in the entire game)... well I just think it doesn't take an expert to realize it's about as unrealistic as you can get. If you don't believe me and this matters to you, buy the game and try it. You will know I'm right within the 2 hour window to return it for a full refund, I assure you. There is no "SSHCrack", no "FTPBounce", these wouldn't be PE executables if they did exist, PE doesn't even run on UNIX, "opening ports" and having requirements for a certain arbitrary number of open ports to "porthack" is very Hollywood. Stahp. Hollywood-style hacking is fine, don't be ashamed of it! But most importantly, advertise this game for it's many strengths, not for a falsehood. This game doesn't need lies to make it sound good, it's already a good game. It's already a great game. Don't make false claims that sour its image.
Ok, now for the big one (to me). Some people, many perhaps, won't care about this but I care. I am quite literally sick to my stomach right now. This has perhaps very minor spoilers for a very small number of optional (so far where I am in the story) missions, so I will spoiler-tag a lot to be safe, but even if you haven't played the game and hate spoilers, you probably won't be upset for reading the spoiler-tagged text in the next paragraph, it's the mildest of mild spoilers.
So, some of the missions require you to access a database of death row records and modify them. The missions are fine, and the topics are relevant. I thought this was a positive thing to include in the game... until I gained access to this database and actually started reading the records. I read about 40 of them in a row, unable to stop. These were not made up, they were real records. They had to be. Surely the names were changed at least, right? I Googled one at random and sure enough it was entirely real, and even the name, age, and date matched. The last words were their real last words, verbatim. There is literally a massive database of actual real people's deaths including their real last words in the game, and there are missions to modify this database! It is making light of a very serious topic with real people's real, actual names, turning it into a game. If I am executed, I don't want my last words to be made into a fun, "cool" game. That's awful! These families are mourning! Please do not take real, actual tragedy and juxtapose it alongside comical IRC chat logs! In a game?! If you are a U.S. company, the families of these people may have legal justification to press charges. I almost hope they do. But instead of that, I would rather you modify your game and replace the real data with artificial data that you make up, or at least change the names and please also their last words. This would have been such a cool set of missions, with a positive political message, but since you used real data it ruins the whole thing and instead makes it a mishandled slog of insensitivity... or... words, I just hate that you used real data for this. Please replace it with artificial data. It won't hurt the game. It will take a single developer a day, if that, and then you can be on the right side of things, morally and honestly probably legally. I plan to ask my lawyer his opinion on this sometime when he's not busy, not to press charges myself (I'm not listed in the data), but just out of legal curiosity if charges could be pressed for something like this.
Anyway this is a fun game and I'm not going to try to refund it, I'm not even going to stop playing it, but I will stop recommending it or buying it for more people (I have a tendency to buy games I like repeatedly for lots and lots of people, friends, family, etc.). I think I bought Necesse 12 or 13 times? I also fully plan to modify this review if my issues are addressed. I will do so as soon as I notice the changes. If you reply to this review when you've addressed them, I will likely notice faster and therefore update it faster... you know, if you don't want one nerd girl's negative review.
TL;DR: Great game, super fun. But it uses false advertising on its Steam page, and is horribly insensitive to real mourning families IRL, and doesn't even change the names.
-- Amy