Over the course of my decade-long tenure as a strict PC-only gamer, I’ve become increasingly familiar with a genre of titles that I can only think to describe as “games for nerds.” That’s not a condemnation of any title in that category by any stretch of the imagination, though I’m keenly aware of how being called a “game for nerds” might sound. What I mean to express with that term is that I suspect those games are most greatly enjoyed by people who are familiar with things like the ins and outs of how computers fit together and function, along with related topics like networking.

Allow me to attempt to elaborate. For instance, I feel as though I enjoy PC Building Simulator as much as I do because I know how to do everything that’s simulated within the game in the real world. I suspect that wouldn’t necessarily be the case if I weren’t already intimately well-versed in the process of building and setting up computers. That title in particular, however, features quite a bit of educational value for those who might be looking to learn what it offers to teach.

Then you have games like Hacknet and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Tech Support: Error Unknown. I agree with what Keiran said in his review of the former of those in that I’m sure a considerable portion of our audience has seen at least one of those television and/or movie scenes of stereotypical “hackers.” You know, the ones who type a bunch of gibberish commands into an MS-DOS prompt or something along those lines when trying to break into a network before triumphantly declaring, “I’m in.”

For many people, those portions of films and other non-interactive media constitute all they know (or at least think they know) about how “hacking” works. However, there are a fair few games I can think of off the top of my head that allow players to assume the roles of those hackers with more competency than any relevant film. One quite recent example of such games is LuGus Studios and Iceberg Interactive’s Midnight Protocol.

Within Midnight Protocol, you play as a prominent “hacktivist” known only by the alias “Data.” The game starts out by showing you a notice from the United Nations Digital Security Office declaring that although you’ve been arrested for hacking-related criminal activity, all charges against you have been formally dropped. This was done because “the Digital Security Office cannot verify beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual in our custody is responsible for the cybercrimes committed under that alias.”

The reason you were arrested is due to a leak of your identity, an act which is commonly referred to nowadays as “doxxing.” When the game’s story begins, you already have a clear idea of who was responsible for leaking your identity to the authorities: a fellow hacker who goes by the alias “Kraken.” What you don’t know is why they doxxed you and ultimately landed you behind bars. Finding out Kraken’s motive is your primary objective within Midnight Protocol.

As you might expect, it isn’t as if you can just send Kraken an email and politely ask them to explain themselves. You must first use your skills and your connections to track them down. Thankfully, you don’t have to go about this momentous task alone. The first time you boot up your computer or “deck,” as they’re apparently called within the game after you’re released from prison, you’ll find an email from one of your allies who operates under the name “Cl0v3r.”

I’ll be referring to this particular ally of yours as “Clover” from now on for simplicity’s sake. In any case, the first email you receive from Clover mentions that they, along with another of your comrades nicknamed Snail, will soon have what they refer to as a few “easy marks” to send you in an effort to help you get your head back in the game. These “marks” will also help you add some funds to your bank account, which will become increasingly important as you progress throughout Midnight Protocol’s campaign.

I think I’ve established enough of the backdrop against which the game’s events take place. Let us now switch gears to how Midnight Protocol’s main gameplay mechanics function. The first thing you’ll likely notice when you start playing is that it’s entirely keyboard-controlled. The game even pops up with a reassuring message explaining that you’re not supposed to be able to see your mouse cursor when you’re in-game in case its absence disoriented you.

When you’re at your deck’s main menu, you’ll need to press your “A” key to access the list of network addresses you can breach for various purposes. From here, you can choose the network with which you’d like to initiate a connection. Once you’ve connected to your chosen network, the game is played entirely via command line-style inputs. Before I can explain how those work, I should mention that each network you can access is composed of a series of what are called “nodes.”

You’ll encounter a multitude of different types of these nodes throughout your time playing Midnight Protocol. To name a few examples of them, you’ll commonly come across access nodes, financial nodes, data nodes, encryption nodes, and bridge nodes, all of which serve their own unique purposes. When you connect to a network, your starting position will always be an access node, usually marked “a0.” From this access node, you can use those command prompts I mentioned a moment ago to carry out your assigned objectives while you’re connected to the current network.

Midnight Protocol’s core gameplay loop is entirely turn-based. With a few exceptions, you can generally carry out a maximum of two actions per turn before you must enter the end command into your terminal to conclude your turn. Once you’ve ended your turn, the network to which you’re currently connected will take its turn. During each of the network’s turns, it will attempt to trace your location. This is technically bad news for you, but only if you’re either careless or exceedingly unlucky.

Each network needs a different amount of turns to completely trace your location, and you can hinder its progress via certain methods. However, the main thing you need to keep in mind is that you should always try to accomplish your objectives and disconnect from the network before its tracing process completes. If you don’t, it’s essentially game over for you. Should you allow a network to fully trace your location, it will do such things as taking over your deck’s processing power, thus rendering you unable to take any action.

It will then add insult to injury by draining money from your personal bank account. Thankfully, even though this constitutes a failure state, Midnight Protocol will allow you to attempt the mission again afterwards if you see fit. In my experience, the game is even kind enough to let you change the programs you have at your disposal to aid in your mission before you connect to that same network again. I know there’s quite a lot to unpack in everything I’ve just said, so let’s break it down together, shall we?

Let us first go back to those nodes I mentioned earlier. As I established, you’ll always start at an access node when you first connect to a network. While your virtual self is standing at that access node, you can do such things as move to a different node in your immediate vicinity or run one of the useful programs you have in what I’ve taken to affectionately calling your “hacker’s utility belt.” For demonstration purposes, let’s suppose that a financial node and a data node are connected directly to your current access node, a0. We’ll also assume that these nodes are labeled f0 and d0, respectively.

Let’s say you want to move to the financial node first. To do this, you would enter “move f0” as your first terminal command. This will move your current position to the node you specified, and it will also consume one of the two available actions in your turn. As far as I’ve experienced up to this point, you can only move a distance equal to one node at a time. Once you’ve moved to a special node (such as any aforementioned nodes), you can interact with them in unique ways depending on what type of node you’re dealing with.

Since your current position is a financial node, you can enter either interact or drain to do this; both of these commands accomplish the same goal. These commands will transfer up to 30 credits from the financial node to your personal bank account. You can continue using these inputs on any financial node you move to until the nodes are out of credits. The game will helpfully tell you exactly how many credits are contained within any given financial node so you know exactly how much draining you still have to do before you should consider moving on.

As you might expect, using these commands will also eat up one of your available per-turn actions. To aid you in draining financial nodes without having to worry about this, you can enter the leech command provided you have the appropriate program in your utility belt. Depending on how much of your deck’s processing power you allocate to the Leech program, it’ll continue to drain a certain amount of credits from the financial node for you automatically at the start of each of your turns without taking up an available action.

Now that you’ve drained every last available credit from that financial node, you’ll want to move on to the data node. However, because the data node and the financial node aren’t directly connected to each other, you’ll first have to move to a node that’s connected to both of them. In this case, that would be the access node that serves as your starting point. To get back to that point, you would need to enter “move a0.” Upon arriving there, you would then input “move d0” to get to the data node.

Once you’re at the data node, you can enter either interact or download to, well, download all the data contained within that node. This process tends to take at least two or three turns. That means you may end up having to wait around without much to do until the download completes. In my experience, you can at least freely move away from the data node as its contents download over the next few turns, though.

With that going on, let’s get into more concepts you should know in order to become an expert hacker and hacktivist in this context. You’ll recall my mentioning earlier that your current network will attempt to trace your location during each of its turns, and that you can (and should) do your best to sabotage its ability to do that via certain methods.

The most common of these methods is a program called Cloak, which starts in your utility belt by default. As its name implies, this program will do its best to hide your IP address from the network and, thus, cause it to take longer to fully trace your location. Therefore, you’re given more time to accomplish your objectives and disconnect from the network without any ill effects.

To initiate the cloak program and have it start doing its thing during each of the network’s turns, you would input the cloak command into your terminal. Once you’ve done this, you’ll see the Cloak interface in the top left portion of your screen. This will, of course, consume one of your per-turn action points, as will launching or terminating any other piece of software you’ve got in your utility belt. The cloak program’s ability to successfully trip up the network as it attempts to trace your location is based directly on how much of your deck’s processing power you allow it to utilize each turn.

By default, your deck has eight so-called “slices” of processing power at its disposal. For the most part, you can split these slices however you wish among any programs you want and/or need to launch at any given time. For example, suppose you’re accessing a financial node and you want to have both the cloak and leech programs active simultaneously. In order to manage this, you’ll have to remove some slices from Cloak because it normally uses all eight of them at once unless you tell it otherwise.

Suppose you want to divide your deck’s processing power evenly between both programs. If you’ve already got cloak running and want to subsequently initiate leech, you must first input “slice cloak 4.” This will cut the amount of processing power allocated to cloak down to four of those slices, thus leaving you with four remaining to allocate to leech. Thankfully, using commands such as this doesn’t consume any of your available per-turn action points, so you can do it as frequently as you need to.

I think I’m almost finished explaining the majority of Midnight Protocol’s core gameplay mechanics, folks. There are just a couple of additional things I should detail before we move on. The first of these is the concept of why and how you should exercise caution when moving between nodes. As you might imagine, many of the networks you’ll infiltrate will be protected with security software. These security measures are collectively referred to in-game as ICE, and they can easily prove to be very bad news for you if you encounter any of them while going about your deeds.

To name a couple of examples of ICE you may encounter, some may prevent you from moving to a specific node entirely. Other types may allow you to pass through at the cost of incurring some ill effects, like decreasing the time the network takes to trace you after you do so. What’s more, ICE is typically hidden from the naked eye when you first breach any given network. If you aren’t careful, it usually doesn’t reveal itself until you run directly into it while attempting to navigate a network.

This might lead you to ask how you can avoid something you can’t even immediately see until it’s too late. That’s quite a reasonable question, and thankfully, the game has an answer to it. You have a means of detecting ICE on any given path between nodes thanks to a program called Sniffer. When you launch Sniffer on a node, it will detect and alert you to any ICE measures on the path between your current location and the node in question. It will continue running for up to two turns once initiated at the cost of two slices of processing power that can’t be adjusted via the slice command.

However, just because sniffer will let you see a security measure blocking your path, that doesn’t mean it can do anything to actually deal with any ICE it detects. You’ll need to use a different program for that. Luckily, it just so happens that you have such a program in your utility belt by default, known as dagger. To assist in explaining how these programs work, let’s briefly return to our hypothetical network composed of a single access node, financial node, and data node.

As always, you begin at the access node, a0. You want to move to f0, but you suspect that there may be an ICE measure between you and that node. You would input “sniffer f0“ to find out if your suspicion is correct. Suppose that sniffer finds an ICE measure in the form of a wall that completely blocks you from moving to f0. Upon detecting that wall, you would enter “dagger” to launch the eponymous program. Keep in mind that you don’t have to tell dagger which node to target. Dagger will then deal damage to the ICE wall over time, with the damage it inflicts per turn based entirely on how many slices of processing power you allocate to it.

The final gameplay mechanic I wish to explain will, mercifully, take significantly less time than anything about Midnight Protocol I’ve discussed thus far. Periodically, the game will test your moral alignment as a hacktivist. It will do so by providing you chances to develop a reputation as one of three classes of hacker: white hat, gray hat, or black hat. I suspect at least some portion of our audience is familiar with those relatively common terms, but allow me to quickly define them for the sake of those who aren’t.

White-hat hackers are those who use their hacking skills solely for the benefit of others and society as a whole, hence the term “hacktivist.” On the opposite side of that coin, black-hat hackers more commonly use their prowess for nefarious and/or self-serving purposes. Given those definitions, as you can probably guess, gray-hats fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. It falls solely to you to decide where you’ll fall on this spectrum.

As an example of how Midnight Protocol tests your alignment, early on in the game’s campaign, you’ll find out about a piece of code designed to embezzle money from the employer of a couple of co-conspirators. You can either reverse engineer that code such that the stolen funds go directly to you without anyone noticing, or forward evidence against these schemers directly to the relevant authorities. I like to think this instance also serves as a warning: if you’re going to do something that’s both ill-advised and illegal, don’t put it in writing. You never know when or how it may come back to haunt you.

Alright, now that I’ve given you folks an exceptionally long-winded crash course on how to play Midnight Protocol, it’s high time I started explaining what I actually like and dislike about it. My first talking point on that front brings me back to something I said at the beginning of this article. I wholeheartedly consider Midnight Protocol to be one of those “games for nerds” I talked about earlier.

I’m honestly not sure whether or not that’s a good thing. I personally think it’s a point in the game’s favor, but then again, I’m a self-proclaimed massive nerd and proud of it. I studied things like advanced computer operation, networking, and cybersecurity in college. This is exactly the kind of game that appeals to the vast majority of my skills and interests.

Obviously, though, not everyone who might be interested in Midnight Protocol has the same background and personality as I do. I suspect the fact that the game seems to primarily appeal to people like me might hurt its popularity among the general gaming population. However, in the event that you’re not like me in these regards but still want to see what Midnight Protocol might have to offer you, that brings me to a definite point in the game’s favor.

LuGus Studios likely knows they won’t exclusively sell this game to computer geeks such as myself. As such, they put quite a bit of effort into providing useful tutorials which serve to help players acclimate to how this title is intended to be played. I’ve never felt that these tutorials held my hand too much at all, but they did certainly assist me greatly as I dove in and attempted to figure out which way was up, so to speak.

I readily admit that I’ve made more than my fair share of grave mistakes during my time playing Midnight Protocol thus far. No matter how many miscalculations I’ve made, though, not once have I even considered blaming the game because there wasn’t a tutorial to show me how to do something or what to do when I get into a jam. That is to say, the game is as forgiving as it can reasonably afford to be, and I’ve felt like all of my missteps were genuinely my fault. Thus, I was able to learn from them and improve going forward.

Off the top of my head, there’s only one somewhat major thing I can think of that I dislike about this title. Namely, when you connect to a network for a mission to advance through the story campaign, you’ll find after each mission that you’ve been given an overall letter grade on several aspects of your performance. You’re graded on such things as how well you completed all your assigned objectives, or as many objectives as you were able to complete before things went south. You are also graded on how long it took you to finish the mission and disconnect from the target network.

I’m not exactly keen on this idea of assigning players grades because Midnight Protocol may very well be played by an audience that isn’t nearly as tech-savvy as the target audience. For these players, being graded on their performance could prove to be quite disheartening and, therefore, turn that portion of the game’s audience away from this title entirely. I know I certainly wouldn’t like it if I were frequently given grades along the lines of “C” or below if I were in that position.

Having said all that, I believe I would still recommend Midnight Protocol overall. I’ve said before that playing games like PC Building Simulator may evoke enough curiosity in certain folks that they learn to build real computers in much the same way as playing Guitar Hero has inspired legions of people to learn to play a real guitar. Perhaps playing Midnight Protocol and its contemporaries might have the same effect on those who wish to learn to use “elite hacks,” as the youth would say.

A PC review key for Midnight Protocol was provided by Iceberg Interactive for this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Midnight Protocol

$14.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Frequent, Quite Helpful Tutorials
• Gameplay Will Likely Greatly Appeal to Newcomers and the Tech-Savvy Alike
• Gripping Story Campaign

Cons

• Post-Mission Grading System Could Be Discouraging for Newcomers
• Frequent Written Use of Strong Language Feels Somewhat Unnecessary