The typical vision of a hacker involves a lit cigarette, the dull glow of a computer screen, and lots of furious typing. 868-HACK goes in a different direction. It's a cyberpunk-styled hack 'em up that has you sliding a tiny smiley face around in order to extract as much data as you can before getting caught. The game consists of eight levels, and each one is full of both data packets and enemies looking to destroy you. Deciding which data to extract is where much of the strategy comes into play: some packets give you new abilities, some will contribute to your high score, and all will summon additional enemies on screen. The more useful the data, the bigger the onslaught of new enemies.

Every decision feels important

You can attack foes by swiping in their direction, as well as by using powerups that can do things like push them away from you or damage all enemies of a certain type (there are glitches, viruses, and more, and each behaves differently). The problem is that you can only take a few blows before dying, and it's pretty easy to find yourself overwhelmed if you're not careful. 868-HACK is an incredibly challenging game. Every decision you make feels important to your safety, even if it's something as simple as whether you'll move left or right. One wrong choice and you're surrounded by viruses, unable to grab any precious points to push yourself up the high score leaderboard.

The inevitability of death also means that 868-HACK is a relatively quick game, making it a perfect fit for your iPhone, as you can get in some solid hacking time on the go. It also comes to us from Michael Brough, the same mind behind maddeningly difficult games like Corrypt and VESPER.5. You can grab it on iOS for $5.99 at the source link below; a PC version is also in the works.