Hacknet

Does this actually teach you hacking? No. But it does touch on adjacent concepts in a fun way and with a good story. Really fun when you are used to the terminal and it does kind of give you the feeling of being a hacker on TV dishing out commands.

A friend gave me a cracked version of this game back in ~2017, and it was mostly collecting dust in my storage until I decided to actually buy it. This game is so incredibly immersive that you feel like you're actively breaking into servers and performing espionage. The plot is rich and quite moving, and personally I found myself stuck playing for many consecutive hours just because I needed to see what happened next. This seriously contributed to my interest in studying cybersecurity! XD ALSO CHECK OUT THE LABYRINTHS DLC; THE PLOT IS ON PAR OR BETTER 11/10

I just finished this game, and I had a great time. I've played a few hacker-sim games over the years, and this is the first one I felt like I could dig my teeth into. It wasn't terribly overwhelming in terms of the tutorial or game mechanics like most other hacker games, but most of you hacking involves typing commands into a fake terminal, so you do feel like a movie-style hacker. This is enhanced by a phenomenal soundtrack and a well-designed HUD. I particularly like that programs that you run are added to a window on the HUD that represents your RAM usage, and when you run a program (porthack, SSHcrack, etc) take up the amount of space in the window as how much RAM it's using. Might not make a lot of sense typing it out, but essentially you can visually see how much total RAM you have vs the amount of RAM whatever you're running at any given time. You kind of have to play it to fully get what I mean, but it can add a lot of tension when you're watching a passive trace count down with the next hack command in the terminal just WAITING for the previous hack to complete so you can activate it. The story is also really interesting, and there are lots of little fun things to find in the files of the devices you hack into if you dig around and read txt and IRC files. There's even a functional clicker game you can play! The game is fairly short: a 10-15 hour story, but it's really interesting and fun do dive into. I did have to look up a walkthrough a couple times, but once I read the solution, I realized it was something incredibly obvious that I just missed or forgot to do. I recently started my second playthrough, and I'm excited to find secrets I ignored or missed during my first playthrough. If you want to feel like a 1337 haxorz pr0 this is the game for you. It was made by a handful of people, but is bursting with personality and interesting design. This is probably going to be added to my rotation of games to replay every year. (Seriously tho, check out the IRC Logs. There's some funny ♥♥♥♥ in there)