Code to Joy

Commit clever crimes in Quadrilateral Cowboy’s

- Tom Senior

This is a game about heists. You scan documents from offices in lockdown, steal safes from banks, download the brains of coma patients in hospitals floating in space. You achieve this with the help of a hacking deck, some springboards, a tiny dog like robot that can go places you can’t, and a gun turret in a suitcase. Except that, technically speaking, you never actually execute these heists at all.

The plucky Impala team like to beat a virtual build of each job before risking their real life necks. This affords you a lot of luxuries puzzle games rarely allow, such as the ability to no clip through walls to look at the level from any angle. Instant restarts, tutorial messages and the abstract nature of many of the levels are thus accounted for in the fiction.

Your deck is your greatest weapon in Quadrilateral Cowboy’s strange environments. This little computer can hack gates, doors and laser grids using a simple command line language. Imagine a corridor with door 1 at one end and door 2 at the other. Typing ‘door1.open(3)’ into your deck will open the first door for three seconds. You can queue up commands with semicolons. So ‘door1.open(3); wait(3); door2.open(3)’ opens door 1, gives you three seconds to walk down the hall, and then opens the door at the end for three seconds. This is a key skill that lets you accomplish heists with maximum efficiency—necessary if you want to top the leaderboards that pit your time against your friends.