![]() Government Conspiracy: You accidentally uncover one while pranking the President.Fun with Acronyms: Apparently "EMBER" in EMBER-2's name stands for " Emulated Multi- Branch Emotional Reasoning".For Science!: Many of the hacks are 'experiments' to see how people react to chaos.Foreshadowing: The government conspiracy detailed below is hinted at early on in the EXAPUNKS chat.Everything Is Online: It's entirely possible to hack radios, TV station and banks from the comfort of the player character's living room.Dueling Hackers: The hacker battle levels.If WorkHouse is any indication, some jobs are outsourced via internet to people willing to do them for chump change. The aforementioned "motivation" is a disease turning his body into computer parts. The Player Character is a hacker with a Healthcare Motivation working under the orders of an AI. Brain Uploading: At the end of the game, EMBER-2 convinces you to upload yourself into her, both to allow you to survive the phage and to make her more effective at escaping the simulated universe the characters are trapped in.They're perfectly functional, but not connected in any meaningful way, which means, to quote the in-universe article about it, "if left unchecked, leaves the body a lifeless amalgamation of purposeless circuitry". Body Horror: The "phage", a disease turning the host's flesh into circuits.Blue-and-Orange Morality: Ember doesn't get human morality at all, despite her best attempts.Bland-Name Product: WorkHouse is Amazon Mechanical Turk of the 1990's.So unless you have a new hobby of going to the beach and eating sand every day, followed by a stop for snacks at a metals recycling plant, the materials for those components would run out before the Phage can do very much. That's 1 gram of silicon, and a lot less of the rest for an average adult. Most electronic components are made from silicon, aluminum, copper, tin, and silver - all of which make up an exceptionally small percentage of the human body. Artistic License – Chemistry: The Phage turns biological tissue into circuitry of various descriptions.It's presented as an in-universe hacker zine, and can be printed for extra immersion. All There in the Manual: Similarly to Shenzhen I/O, there's some documentation the player is expected to print out and consult when needed.Is a Crapshoot: Ember-2 is a rogue AI that asks the player to hack on its behalf. The use of a visualization of program operations helps more novice coders see and understand what's going on, while also adding a cute, 1980's cyberpunk motif to give your deeply-repressed memories of Johnny Mnemonic a shake. Players are taught (for a given value of "taught") assembly language and use it to program EXAs, or Execution Agents, which serve as runtime agents for whatever the player codes. While there's a visual representation of what's going on, the actual gameplay is in writing actual code. Unlike most games and films that cover programming, EXAPUNKS doesn't rely on a visual user interface for completing its tasks. Since you're well on your way to being the strangest inventory item at Best Buy, you really don't have a choice. However, despite being a sapient computer program, EMBER can't actually do this stuff itself, so it makes a deal with you: one hack, one dose of cure. Like any good scientist made by the lunatics at a software company, EMBER has decided that the best way to advance its understanding is a series of experiments, giving society stimuli and observing the reactions. EMBER's origins are shady, motivations shadier, and goals downright redacted apart from wanting to "understand" human motives and actions better. Then, one day, while contemplating your life as a soon-to-be Homo sapiens hewlettpackardi, you're contacted out of the blue by EMBER-2, who quickly fesses up to being an AI in search of. Unfortunately, The Phage is also cyber-Alzheimer's, so you can barely remember old friends and are reduced to the lofty career of receipt transcriptionist at a whopping ten cents a pop. Oh, you used to be able to afford it, back before you needed it, because you were an uber-hacker whose name is still spoken with reverence. Over time, it will kill you, and as a have-not, you can't afford the medication that can keep the disease at bay. What you do have is The Phage, a disease which slowly converts the squishy human bits you have into useless random computer bits like capacitors and chips. ![]() You are a have-not, at least as far as wealth and power go. As everybody knew it would, the world has become a cyberpunk dystopia, where the haves presumably have, while the have-nots definitely don't. EXAPUNKS is a Programming Game by Zachtronics, released on PC on August 9th 2018. ![]()
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