David’s Backlog Busting: Quadrilateral Cowboy Preview

I ditched Windows for Linux on my main gaming PC a few months ago. As I’ve learned more about how to use Linux and its many differences from Microsoft’s bloated spyware that masquerades as an operating system, I’ve joked that I feel more and more like a hacker with each passing day. Blendo Games’ Quadrilateral Cowboy has helped to reinforce that idea somewhat, and I’ve found that I quite enjoy playing it for more reasons than just that. Standard Backlog Busting rules dictate I could only spend two hours with Quadrilateral Cowboy for this article, but in this case, that’s an ample amount of time.

Quadrilateral Cowboy (allegedly) takes place at some point during the twentieth century. For lack of a better description, Quadrilateral Cowboy is a cyberpunk, hacking-focused, mission-based adventure game in which you use cutting-edge technology (for its time) to carry out heists on behalf of anyone who can afford to pay you to do so. In Quadrilateral Cowboy’s prologue mission, you hack and sneak your way aboard a moving train in order to steal what turns out to be a processor that is the final missing piece of the highly advanced machine you need to carry out heists for your clients.

That machine appears to have a rudimentary virtual reality headset built into it, which is how you go about pulling off the heists in every subsequent mission. Your payout and mission objectives are dictated by the level and preferred difficulty. To start missions, you insert a cassette tape into one of the CRT combi displays (ask your parents), place your eyes into the VR headset, and you’ll find yourself at the location of your heist. You spawn at your “insertion point,” which will also be your respawn point if you die during a mission.

You start each mission with what’s called a “deck” in your inventory (no involvement from Valve on this one). This is your primary hacking interface, and you’ll use it to get past obstacles between you, your objectives, and your extraction point. You start by typing in the “telnet” command, which will grant you access to every network-connected obstacle in the mission. Things you can interact with are labeled, e.g. “door1,” “laser0,” “camera3,” etc. These labels are how you interact with said object via commands you’ll enter on your deck. As you might imagine, those commands start out quite simple.

You might find yourself in front of a locked door labeled “door0.” So, you’ll pull out your deck, enter the “telnet” command if you haven’t already, then type in the “door0.open” command and, hey presto, you’re past that locked door. Things get vastly more complicated than that as you progress through Quadrilateral Cowboy’s campaign, however. You might be asking, “If you can open doors and disable security cameras so easily, why don’t you just permanently disable every obstacle in your way at the same time and then leisurely stroll through the rest of the mission?” The answer is simple: Security systems.

Since you’ll be sneaking into increasingly fortified areas in each mission, it stands to reason that whoever owns those buildings would have security systems in place to keep out the likes of you. Security systems can be hooked up to things like locked doors and windows, security cameras, and intrusion-detection lasers. Due to this, any such obstacle you disable via your deck will trigger an alarm if it’s altered for more than a certain amount of time (usually three seconds). Since you haven’t exactly gained authorization to enter any of these buildings, I’m sure you can see why that’s problematic.

Thus, you’ll have to make sure you open locked doors and windows, disable cameras, and turn off lasers for just long enough to get past them without setting off any alarms. That’s one reason the commands you’ll enter on your deck become increasingly complex over time. Say you need to steal a briefcase that’s both behind a locked door and in clear view of a security camera. To pull that off, you’d likely have to enter a single stream of commands such as the following sequence: “door0.open(3); wait(5); camera2.off(3); wait(5); door0.open(3).” Now, what the heck does all that techno-babble mean?

I’m glad you asked! In order, you open the door for three seconds, wait five seconds for the next command, disable the camera for three seconds, wait another five seconds, and open the door again for three seconds. If you’re quick enough, that command should allow you to get in, grab the briefcase, and get out without being seen by the camera or setting off the alarms for the door being open and the camera turned off. That’s trickier than it sounds.

The semicolons present in that example string of commands tell your deck that you want those instructions to be carried out in that order without you having to manually type in each command when you want it to happen. You’ll have to do that quite often because you’ll rarely have enough time to pull out your deck and type in additional commands when you’re trying not to trigger any alarms. It also so happens that each building you infiltrate is equipped with gun turrets that will kill you for tripping alarms.

Thankfully, Quadrilateral Cowboy has a few things in common with Hotline Miami in that respect. You can restart missions at any time simply by pressing the F3 key, whether you’ve tripped any alarms or not. Should you happen to die during a mission, whether from those gun turrets, a lethal fall, or anything else, you can restart the mission just as quickly. You’re also timed during missions and have the ability to replay missions as much as you want, so you can put in the time and effort to learn how best to speedrun each mission if you so desire.

As you might expect if you know anything about me, the speedrunning aspects of Quadrilateral Cowboy are of no interest to me whatsoever. Nevertheless, I still enjoy its core gameplay loop and its quality-of-life features like quick restarts and mission replayability. However, its core gameplay loop could present several issues from an accessibility standpoint. Another point in Quadrilateral Cowboy’s favor is that those potential accessibility pitfalls are counterbalanced by the ability to enable and disable “noclip” mode at will. Allowing you to walk through solid objects and removes any danger of falling to your death.

If you’re not familiar with any titles made by Blendo Games, I should acknowledge two aspects of their games that might “weird you out” somewhat. Namely, the fact that their games’ titles aren’t the most straightforward (see Thirty Flights of Loving for additional evidence), and that it seems every character in their games was built out of cereal boxes with hair and faces drawn onto them. I want to emphasize that I mean all of that as a compliment, but I also want to make sure you’re prepared. Overall, I’d gladly recommend Quadrilateral Cowboy if you’re not concerned about accessibility issues.