I only review really good games
... or possibly games that have potential. However this game was amazing. I really enjoyed the levels that required timing to be quite precise; it added a nice challenge every now and then. The story was OK, nothing SUPER intriguing, I skipped some of it. Music was great for the type of sounds played, but you could have made it a bit better at looping?
Overall: Great job.
Harrrdddddd
Highly addictive but very difficult! All in all, a good game, good job.
Exploit: An Overly Long Review
Though, perhaps I over-exaggerate its importance, I would not be surprised if Gregory Weir eventually becomes known, not only as a watershed game creator, not merely for Newgrounds or Kongregate, and not merely for Flash, but rather for the whole of casual gaming.
On its surface, Exploit is a puzzle game. You click the right buttons in the right order so that the beeps are made at the right time. The interface is unforgiving, and thus slightly annoying, but the pleasures of beating each level, and unlocking each new part of the game cannot be denied.
(Plot Spoilers Below)
However it is what lies beneath that is important. As you sit at your computer clicking through each puzzle, it becomes clear that (in-game world, at least) you are culpable as any of multiple characters in a gripping tangled web of politics, justice and fate. You start believing yourself to be a cracking freedom fighter, striking an internet counterattack for the people, and yet are faced with how close said hacking makes you to being a terrorist, period. You attempt to save a life, unfairly about to be taken, but in doing so, put more in jeopardy. The lines between the methods and aims of the US and the fictional dictatorship become increasingly blurred. And, in order to stop the threat that you yourself have brought upon America, you are forced to resort to the level of Big Brother surveillance and infiltration that you started the game so focused against. The ending is happy, but ominous... you have broken dozens of federal, state, and international laws and pinned them on a foreigner, burned to death in an elevator, as convinced of the righteousness of his crusade as you were. You have saved a life, but the totalitarian nature of both the foreign land and your home country move on. The game refuses any easy answers, and the victory is bittersweet. Perhaps a pastry would be a good idea.
The fact that all of this plays out in the familiarity of personal e-mail, Spam, online wire reports, and the abstraction of icons etc. (which I prefer to think of as an aesthetic choice on the part of the designer... certainly he has shown in previous works that he can create complicated visuals with the best of them) adds another level of starkness to the narrative. It forces one to think about how much the world is now controlled by people at keyboards, how much our lives have slowly become dominated by code and firewalls... how the push of a button, or a Social Security number sent in the wrong direction could mean the ruination or death of people never met, represented only by cold green letters and a small box of pixels. The world is being made into a perfect abstraction at exactly the point where it should not be. You thrill herein at defeating a puzzle, when your sole reward is the defrauding of an airline, or a theft of a prison vehicle. For all the good it has done, the internet has allowed immoralities to be casual, and Exploit is a reflection.
You receive familiar SPAM that begs you for your bank number, and it is easy to discard without thinking. But is your character truly any more morally righteous? The Spammer's only crime is to try to make an inethical buck off of a naive patron of the internet... but your character breaks into local, federal and international systems on a far wider scale, with far more illegality, with far higher (even deadly) stakes resting upon your callousness... and yet, you have a filter for your Spam. You worry about the dangers outside your moat, when a plague is set to be released from your castle.
I highly reccomend this game. You may find the interface finicky, and the puzzle resets slow, but it is an experience not to be missed, to be played to its conclusion, and to be thought about afterwards. Perhaps I take it too seriously, perhaps I give it too much credit, but it made me thrill, it made me sweat, and it made me think, a trio far lacking from many, even high-budget game releases.
Excellent Work, Sir.
Thank you very much.
puzzleing(spelt wrong)
damnnnnnn that`s an og puzzle game
i love the editor!!!
so much fun!