Focal Shift

There are few design challenges more vexing than the hacking minigame. They’re a nearly unavoidable necessity in anything cyberpunk: sure, you can let the player succeed with just a simple HACK COMPUTER, but that makes a skill that should be exciting and narratively significant just a big “I win” button, or you can go the other direction and implement a full emulation of running cracking programs and installing rootkits and what-not, but that’s incredibly high-overhead and likely to limit your audience. So the minigame is the least-worst option, as proved by such notable triumphs of game design as the PipeMania clone in Bioshock, the node-capturing abstraction of Deus Ex, and the flying-around-shooting-giant-shapes of System Shock.

So it’s to be expected that Focal Shift, a cyberpunk heist unembarrassed to be playing the genre’s hits (you’re a freelancer working for a shady client, with a job to raid a corporate databank and an experimental implant giving you an edge…) has not one but two hacking minigames; what’s more, pretty much all the puzzles bar one or two run through these systems, blurring the line between “minigame” and “actually just the game.”

It’s a bold move, but to its credit the game has the chops to back it up. It’s based on the GameFic engine, which I recently encountered in this year’s ParserComp entry Project Postmortem; I found it a solid platform for that demo-length game, and it confirms that impression in this full-sized experience. It does just about everything you want a modern parser system to do, down to seamless choice-based gameplay integration for dialogue, with no bugs that I ran across. As for the design of the minigames, the first is a Wordle-alike with a twist, and the second is a wandering-around-cyberspace-messing-with-a-keycode riff that escalates nicely; they also interact interestingly with the real-world layer, most notably with the option to solve a small puzzle in meatspace to upgrade your abilities in the first of the games.

The way the minigames communicate their rules to the player is inconsistent, however – because in neither case are you given the rules of the road. The second one seems linked to your new implant, and only comes into play towards the end of the game; I’ll keep the details vague since it is pretty clearly set up as a twist, but for all that I found it pretty easy to suss out via trial and error, and since the first time you experience it time pressure is light, there’s no penalty to replaying things, and the interface helps cue you towards what a correct solution will look like. The first minigame is a different kettle of fish, however. It’s recognizable a Wordle/Mastermind game – you type in guesses for six-letter passwords, and you get feedback based on how close you were to the right answer – but while I figured out that if the response shows you a letter in one of the blank spaces, that means you got it right, I was completely flummoxed about what the +s and -s that otherwise would appear, since they didn’t correspond to the “letter not present in solution” and “letter is in the solution but now in the right place” options that I was expecting. After finishing the game I checked the walkthrough, so now I understand that it’s doing something distinct, but at the time I worried I had just run into some bugs, so I wound up brute-forcing all of these puzzles. It was less than fun, and worse, it felt needlessly obfuscated because unlike the second minigame, which seemed like a surprise to the protagonist, there’s no indication that this first one is anything other than routine; surely there should be a manual, or quick flashback, explaining how the rules work, since there’s no diegetic reason for the main character to be flailing.

There’s not much to Focal Shift outside of these minigames beyond cyberpunk tropes, as I mentioned before, but I still found its specific take enjoyable. There’s a jaded-but-still-idealistic street doc, a double-cross, all the stuff that you want to see. Making the target of the job a financial tech company focused on the blockchain is also a decision that feels novel but completely natural for this kind of story. And there’s a sly humor to some of the writing; I especially enjoyed this dig from the client (who’s monitoring everything through the implant) when I stopped to watch TV so I could check out the worldbuilding being done by the news chyrons:

“You get your fill of world events, Brokaw? Chop chop. Let’s get this over with.”

Focal Shift isn’t a game that will stick with you long after finishing it, admittedly – it’s telling a story you’ve heard before, with a mechanical approach that’s its own but recognizably of a piece with a million other implementations of these ideas. But the level of execution is nonetheless high, modulo the decision not to tutorialize the main hacking minigame in order to non-diegetically increase the difficulty.