It feels as if first-person hacking adventure Quadrilateral Cowboy has been in development for a long time, but the truth is that four years isn’t uncommon by modern standards. Instead, it feels long because Quadrilateral Cowboy because it’s been good for a long time. Since that first build we played back in 2012, we’ve been wowed by its style, its retro-inspired machinery, its heists.

Now it has a release date: July 25th.

In Quadrilateral Cowboy, you’re breaking into buildings, but doing so using a hacking deck – which is a briefcase laptop you can plonk down and plug in at points around levels. From there you’re given a command line interface into which you can write short scripts in order to manipulate parts of the level, such as opening doors and turning off security cameras and lasers. The aim is to write a script that allows you to then physically walk past a building’s security as everything opens and closes with perfect, undetected timing around you.

But that’s not all. You’re also controlling a team of heist-doers in tandem, setting up the actions of one person and then leaping into the shoes of another in order to perform another task simultaneously. Caser, Hacker, Engineer and Greaseman all need to work together to pull off the perfect caper.

Except that’s not all, as it also takes place in a retro-futuristic world where hacking is performing using old telephones, 56k modems, and where everything is a solid, physical object with clacky switches and physicsy cords and chunky plugs.

Except tha— alright, I’ll stop. Quadrilateral Cowboy is the game I’m most looking forward to, only I had mentally placed on the backburner of my mind because its release had slipped a few times and its “2016” promise seemed uncertain. Now that it has a specific date, however, I have turned up the gas on my excitement.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is coming to Windows via Steam on July 25th, and will land on Linux and Mac in September. Here’s what the game looked like back in 2013:



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