With a blurb promising a murder most foul and a cyberheist gone sideways, this entry hooked me before I even hit the play button.
Review of Focal Shift
I am not a hacker, nor do I have a clear picture of what being a hacker even entails, practically speaking. But I’ve seen enough movies to know what a hacker is supposed to feel like, and that’s the great triumph of Focal Shift: it makes me feel like a hacker.
Before I oversell this thing, a word about its scope. You’re looking at a single shortish, self-contained mission, featuring lightly-sketched characters, in a lightly-sketched world where your knowledge of generic cyberpunk tropes will likely fill in most of the blanks. The story being told here is not particularly new, nor is it overly ambitious.
And that’s just fine, because the draw of Focal Shift is all about how elegantly it shepherds your journey through that single mission. Your goals are clear, and from the very beginning, there is dramatic tension to push you forward—you need to finish this contract because you desperately need the money. From there, the stakes keep ratcheting up with every twist and turn, until you’re hacking more desperately than ever before in a climax that will determine your very survival. The execution of a thrilling data heist is all about momentum, and this game has it.
It also features hacking minigames which are used to brilliant effect, with a caveat.
See, my practice in this competition so far has been: if an entry has a walkthrough file, I open it and scan the first couple of lines. If it’s just a plain old walkthrough, I close it, but if it looks like it contains some special information that I really ought to know upfront, I keep reading. Lo and behold, in this case, it contained an explanation of the rules of the hacking minigames, which seemed like something that I wanted to know upfront.
So when I say:
- that I loved the hacking minigames;
- that they posed an entertaining challenge while still being eminently graspable;
- that they sidestepped many of the common sticking points of parser-based puzzles by situating themselves within a framework of clear rules, clear goals, and clear expected inputs;
- and that they made me feel like an über-smart hacker on a dangerous mission who always manages to finish the job just in the nick of time;
…you should understand that my experiences in all those regards are influenced by the fact that I read the instructions, and it’s not entirely clear whether that is the intended way to play the game. Would I have ended up having even more fun if I had gone in blind and had to figure out the rules for myself? Or would I have ended up resorting to the walkthrough in frustration? The world will never know.