Quadrilateral Cowboy

Quadrilateral Cowboy is Blendo Games' first-person cyberpunk hacking adventure, set in a retro-futuristic world where the highest-end gear is a hacking deck running 256k of RAM and a 56.6k modem. With hardware that good, the only people who can afford to hire you are the highest bidders — which is exactly the kind of work the game expects you to take.

The central mechanic is genuine command-line hacking. You type instructions into an intuitive in-game terminal to hijack doors, cameras, robots, alarms, weapons and other devices in real time during a heist. Layering commands together — opening a door for exactly three seconds, then closing it before the guard catches up — is the kind of small puzzle the game routinely throws at you, scaled up over the course of larger jobs. The hacking deck shares the toolkit with grey-market peripherals like the Launcher Pad (which blasts you across rooftops), the Autocase (which remotely controls a high-powered rifle), and the Weevil (a tiny pilotable robot for crawling through spaces you can't fit into).

The game won the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the IGF Excellence in Design award and the IndieCade Grand Jury award — recognition that reflects its commitment to systemic level design where every heist is a clockwork puzzle with multiple legitimate solutions. Approach quietly, low and slow; or fast and loud with everything triggering at once — the levels are built to accommodate either. The Deluxe Edition adds an interactive art book and PDFs for box art, posters and papercraft characters on top of the developer commentary and reference manual included in the standard release.