Best Hacking 1980s Games on PC

NCradle: An 80s Synth Adventure

Very fun, if short game with a great soundtrack.

– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game

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Read More: Best Hacking Great Soundtrack Games.

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Zero Page

Zero Page is a single-player survival horror puzzle game that dares you to survive the horror of solving puzzles by yourself in space. If that wasn’t horrifying enough, you’re also going to have to solve them on a deserted spaceship using the only piece of equipment that still works: a personal computer from 1981. But with a little bit of BASIC and a lot of high-stakes debugging, you might just live long enough to find out why you’re alone, why you’re in space, why you’re on a dying ship circling an unknown planet, and why that ship wants to kill you.

Back to BASIC

Find out if you’re smart enough to not die in space, armed only with a machine that struggles to count higher than 256 — a highly accurate recreation of a classic 1980s personal computer, complete with floppy discs and a joystick.

A Game About Thinking (The Thinking Man’s Shooting)

Put that laser gun back in your space pants. You’re going to have to program your way out of this problem, by writing code that actually physically changes your environment.

Also a Game About Action (The Action Man’s Thinking)

You won’t just be sitting at an old computer — well, you will, but not fictionally. In addition to programming, you’ll also get your hands dirty resurrecting an ancient spacecraft — patching critical holes, pressing important buttons, and bringing systems back online so they can start keeping you alive again.

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Read More: Best Hacking Exploration Games.

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The Creation of a Self

A love letter to 80s and 90s retro computing. A game that intersects poetry, programming, computers, love, death, freedom and living. Create a new self, program its memories, and destroy memory monsters created from those memories.

FEATURES

• a glitched out computer interface sprinkled with the latest retro inspired visuals

• 2D/Puzzle/FPS game elements: from a runner, a terminal and desktop with puzzles, to FPS levels where you destroy 9 different memory monsters

• 100s of poems as memories, ready to program a new self

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Read More: Best Hacking Exploration Games.

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Beast Agenda 2030

Beast Agenda 2030 is a action rpg, stealth, strategy, alien(squid) end of time biblical feel game where you must join the resistance, rescue survivors, gather resources, use makeshift weapons, and escape with your team to a safe place if you want to have any chance of saving mankind as we know it. Oh…and did I mention that there are no weapons like guns or swords so you will have to improvise if you want to live very long. All of these things make for a very entertaining game that I would recommend to anyone who is up for an adventure where you can decide how you want to go about different missions. What I mean by this is that there is many ways to go about many things in the game and you can decide which way you want to achieve these goals. If you fail at one method, there are many more to try until you do succeed.There is a great story here but I don’t want to give to much away. I feel this is a game you will want to try for yourself and immediately feel the atmosphere of the game especially with the spot on soundtrack that adds to the eerie feel of the end of human kind. This has been especially fun for myself as I was in need of a game that is not quite like anything I have played before or it is different enough to be unique and very entertaining.It is still in early access but there is plenty of content already and it has a super cool dev who is working on new content constantly and updating the game on a regular basis.He is also always willing to help and easy to find.

– Real player with 204.7 hrs in game

Love the game! I’m looking forward to unlocking all of it’s secrets, mini-games and levels!

– Real player with 73.8 hrs in game

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Tusker’s Number Adventure [Malware Detected]

This game was silly, but I can say I honestly had fun and laughs.

I only wanted it so badly because it reminds me of Pony Island (one of my favourite games). I can tell you it has similar qualities but it’s not as good sadly. There’s stuff to do but I felt like there wasn’t as much as I expected and not as many hard parts that stump you or have you second guessing yourself.

Overall good to kill some time with.

– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game

Fun game now I know how to count to 10 if only this game teach me to count to 20. but for real this is a ok game. It a Interesting idea that need to be worked on a little bit more. I give it a 6/10

– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game

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Breadbox

An interesting take on an emulator… If the price doesn’t put you off.

I have only tried the Commodore 64 emulator so far. I like it, it gives a sense of depth to running programs with the models and sounds of the hardware there. It took a while to get used to the keyboard layout and I still haven’t found the £ mapping but otherwise it is smooth sailing. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there was a patch sometime in the not so distant future that addressed that (or I have to smash more buttons to find the pound sign :)). Joystick supported. I spent much more time with this thing than I thought I would and I gifted a copy to a friend who had one of these as a kid.

– Real player with 41.4 hrs in game

I love this simulator, and it is definitely my favourite simulator/emulator that I have used.

– Real player with 20.4 hrs in game

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Hack Grid

Full disclosure: I was a playtester for this game.

In Hack Grid each level has a different setup of pieces and trails within a 4x4 grid (sometimes it’s smaller).

In order to move a piece, it must have a straight line of trails or empty sockets leading to a differently colored piece. What makes the grids interesting is not only the different setups of pieces, but also the way the trails connect between them; It varies from level to level, and sometimes the lack of a direct trail between two pieces can trip you up, if you are not paying enough attention to the trails.

– Real player with 6.0 hrs in game

Do you have some free time during your evening? Do you like puzzle games? Are you nostalgic for DOS aesthetics? Great, then Hack Grid is a game just for you!

This is a well-made game. Sure, it’s relatively short, but I think it has just enough puzzles to explore its simple, yet entertaining gameplay. I didn’t encounter any bugs, it runs smoothly. Graphics are minimalistic, very nice, and you can spice them up a little with CRT filter. Puzzle themselves have a right level of difficulty, and you get some new mechanic once in a while, so you don’t get bored.

– Real player with 2.7 hrs in game

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Hackshot

HackShot is a puzzle game with a mix of physics, logic and crafting

Analyze the environment, craft your solution, and hack the system!

Immerse yourself into open-ended puzzles where you breach security, destroy viruses, and battle black hats.

Analyze = Craft = Hack

Hundreds of twists, mix-ups, and interactions

Gameplay();

• Over 20 hours of puzzles

• Feel like a real hacker with an optional command console and scripts

• Open-ended puzzles, with multiple solutions

• Craft over 7000 unique cyberballs to use

• Security systems: Anti-virus, Anti-malware, Firewalls, and more

• Viruses: Trojans, Ransomware, Worms, and more

• Hackers will hack your solutions, so plan ahead

• Annoy the developers and solve puzzles in your own way, you have all the necessary tools

Story();

• Learn hacking, meet others in the Murky web, and earn your place on the top

• Meet hackers, security specialists and cyber maniacs, through a mysterious, light-hearted and fun story

• Dynamic narrative: other characters dialogue and reactions are affected by your actions

• View the files you hack, and uncover information and secrets

Accessibility and game settings(still in development);

• There is a quit button in the game, and a quit button in pause menu

• Supports both windowed and fullscreen, and also support widescreen resolutions

• Button remapping, and support for keyboard and mouse, keyboard-only, mouse-only and controllers

• Full support for touch screens both in gameplay and menus

• Full audio controls, and separate audio settings for main menu, gameplay and cutscenes

• The ability to turn off visuals that have repeated patterns

• Color blind mode

• Interface size options

• Color contrast control

–Hackshot Documentation–

_Who reads the documentation?!

Try the web demo, no download required (the link is provided above in the page), and have fun_

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Comet 64

I’ve been playing Comet 64 since the closed beta and this game was already wonderful!

It looks just like I have dreamed for a long time, because I’m not a big fan of visual programming. In my opinion visual programming is divorced from reality, and in Comet 64 I finally have to write code by hands, which adds immersivity.

In visual programming I mean games like Human Resource Machine , 7 Billion Humans and some others.

– Real player with 21.6 hrs in game

Alright, high-level: if you’re here, you probably know about Zachtronics and Tomorrow Corporation’s games in the programming genre. This game is good. If you like those, you’ll like this.

The system constraints are novel and challenging.

The puzzles are a good escalation of difficulty and concepts.

The vibe is 100% in line with TIS-100 and MOLEK-SYNTEZ with the retro 80s graphics, including the option to customize the colors to match your favorite system from yesteryear.

The editting UI needs some love though. This can easily be fixed in a couple of patches, but currently it’s struggling compared to the polish I’ve gotten spoiled with from the more recent Zachtronics titles.

– Real player with 19.1 hrs in game

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