Focal Shift by Fred Snyder
Cyberpunk • One hour • Parser-based • Web-based
Ooh, cyberpunk. I have to admit I enjoy this genre quite a bit. They tend to focus on low-life, high-tech environments, juxtaposing fancy technology with dystopian settings, and characters are often on the opposite side of the law, or at least straddling the line. And in this case, too, a hacker is doing some good old breaking-and-entering before getting involved in a murder case.
The focal shift in the game could be the shift from avoiding the law to working with them, as implied in the blurb. It could also be a more general “bad guy to good guy” transition. I also think the term is camera-related, when you change focus? But I don’t know if that’s relevant here.
It could be. Maybe the hacker is also an amateur photographer whose camera skills help the police capture evidence. And the hacker also plants bugs for even more camera goodness. Physical bugs, that is. Though planting programming bugs would be well within a hacker’s skillset too.
TLDR: hacker-photographer-spy-detective