Quadrilateral Cowboy

It’s the dead of night. You clamber up through a hatch to see the skyscraper where the confidential contract you need to photograph is hidden. Using your portable computer, referred to as your “deck,” you hack open doors and grates to amble on toward your target, disabling security systems along the way. When you finally reach the room, you snap some shots of the contract and then leave just as quietly as you came, vanishing without anyone ever knowing you were there. The perfect crime.

Like most good puzzlers, Quadrilateral Cowboy is about the agony of grasping at epiphany as well as the deep sense of satisfaction you earn when finally overcoming whatever conundrum is blocking your path. However, Quadrilateral Cowboy excels because of its structure and the sheer joy of the gizmos it gives you to solve its puzzles.

The game consists of a series of heists carried out in a virtual world. You begin with only your deck, which lets you input commands and run various programs. This starts out simple enough, allowing you to manipulate certain objects in the environment to progress through each level. For example, if a locked door blocks your path, you can input door.open in the deck’s command line to unlock it.

As Quadrilateral Cowboy goes on, it introduces new elements that make things trickier. That next door you want to unlock? It probably has a timer attached to it that causes an alarm to ring if it’s open longer than three seconds, which dings your performance rating or kills you outright in later levels.

To bypass this obstacle, you have to add a qualifier to your command: door.open (3), with the number in parentheses representing how many seconds the door stays open. Soon you have to string together commands like this in order to quickly bypass cameras and locked doors to reach your target. And that’s only the opening levels, when it’s just you and your deck. To say much about the other gadgets Quadrilateral Cowboy throws into the mix would spoil a lot of its charming aesthetic, an alluring oddball combination of retro espionage and cyberpunk. You see mobile camera robots, turrets hidden in suitcases, and an entire arsenal of cool devices that wouldn’t be out of place in a ’70s spy thriller. Nearly all of them can be controlled by your deck and are essential to completing heists.

Most heists play out basically the same way. You’re given a gadget you earn with money from the last set of missions and it becomes the key tool for getting through the next three missions, which collectively serve as the heist. The first mission teaches you the basics of the tool, the next expects you to use it in combination with whatever else you have in your belt, and the last mission forces you into situations where you must carefully consider how to use that device to get where you need to go.

This might mean navigating a tiny robot through a ventilation shaft or positioning your suitcase turret in an unexpected location so you can hit a necessary button with a bullet.

One of the most surprising things about the game is how accessible it is despite its emphasis on hands-on, command-line hacking. The controls take a few tries to get used to, but once you’re into the swing of things, pulling off challenging feats is surprisingly simple, like guiding a miniature robot around a room or stringing together a bunch of actions to occur within a matter of seconds. If that is too much of a hassle and you want to just experience the story, a “tourist mode” turns off all security alarms and unlocks doors, making failure impossible.

Heists are structured so that you’re just starting to grow tired of a gadget before moving on to a series of missions that are centered on a new gizmo for you to play with. This flow creates an enjoyable experience that’s difficult to stop playing. I even revisited some of the bite-sized missions to beat my previous times.

Between missions, you’re free to explore the base of operations you and your fellow thieves use as well as other areas outside of the heist zones. The narrative is not communicated through dialogue or cutscenes, but instead through action-heavy setpieces as well as environmental storytelling. One of my favorite parts involves how the trio of robbers carpools to work, so you explore each character’s home when you go to pick them up in the early hours of the morning. We might not get a long soliloquy or have a drawn-out conversation with Greaser, one of your companions, but the gadgets-in-progress on her workbench as well as the trophies on her wall tell us more than enough about her personality.

Quadrilateral Cowboy’s storytelling is slightly surreal, but not to the point of being infuriatingly enigmatic. Instead, it’s one of the more enticing qualities. Quadrilateral Cowboy is a strange, fantastic journey that charms and tests you in equal measure. This is easily my favorite puzzle game since Portal 2. I expect to come back to it many times over the next few months despite having completed it, searching the environments for nuggets of story hidden away in the corners of each level and striving to become the best thief this side of cyberspace.

Quadrilateral Cowboy - a retro-futuristic world invites you into its embrace in an unusual puzzle game, where even the most unadvanced PC users will be able to hack the defense system. Three girls could not find the necessary and paid work, so the only way out is stealing. Except that ordinary citizens do not deserve such attitude, unlike large corporations. Solve puzzles, plan crimes and hack databases in this version of the Wild West of the future.

Pros of the game:

• Puzzles as a way to hack into the system
• Learn simple coding while playing the game