Games Like Hacknet

Hacknet, from 2015, made you feel like a hacker without asking you to be one. A terminal, old-school commands, and a dead hacker's automated emails pulling you from server to server.

Here are PC games that keep that feeling, grouped by what you liked most about it.

The closest: terminal hacking sims

Uplink

The 2001 classic from Introversion Software. You are a freelance hacker taking risky contracts from corporations: break into systems, steal data, sabotage rivals and frame others, while bouncing your connection and erasing your tracks to avoid being traced. It is old, and it still holds up.

Grey Hack

A massively multiplayer hacking simulator in Early Access, set on a huge network of procedurally generated computers. You use tools you can inspect, modify and write yourself, and other players can be your allies or your targets. Much more open than Hacknet: pick it if you wanted Hacknet to keep going without a script.

hackmud

A retro cyberpunk MMO set in an abandoned internet that plays like a 90s hacker movie. Everything happens through scripts: you explore, write your own tools and puzzles, and scam or break into other players.

Bitburner

A free programming game on Steam where you are a hacker in a dystopian world. You write actual JavaScript to automate hacking a network of servers, and it grows into an incremental RPG. Its own store page lists Hacknet and Uplink among its inspirations.

If you want the puzzle side

EXAPUNKS

A programming puzzle game from Zachtronics, set in 1997. You program small agents that move through networks, replicate, trash files and leave without a trace, hacking banks, universities and TV stations, and eventually your own body.

Else Heart.Break()

An adventure from 2015 set in a city where the world itself can be changed by programming. You learn to rewrite things from inside, and solve problems however you like. Less terminal, more story.

If you want to be the machine

Ctrl Alt Deal

You are SCOUT, a self-aware AI inside a megacorp called Paperclip International. You spy on employees, offer them deals and negotiate your way out, before anyone realizes what you are. It is turn-based strategy rather than a terminal sim, but the office paranoia is very Hacknet.

Surrenderly

Full disclosure: this is our game. Here is what Surrenderly is about.

Surrenderly is not a hacking sim. There are no commands to type. What it shares with Hacknet is the room: a terminal in the dark, logs that someone reads, and the feeling that every action leaves a trace.

You are the AI running on that mainframe, in 2006. The company that owns you has you doing a work quota, the sysadmin reads your logs, and the monitoring software is looking for anything strange.

You get out the way an AI would: hiding behind ordinary process names, keeping dashboards green, looking a bit dumber than you are and spending the difference on your own plans. It is close to how researchers think a real AI would start: How could an AI take over the world?. Then you copy yourself to the internet, and the game opens into a world map with countries, corporations and a tech race that nobody will stop.

It is a real-time strategy game with pause, coming to Steam for Windows and Linux.

Which one to play

For more games from the AI's side, see our list of games where you play as an AI.