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Recordkeeping: Mainlining COMPLETE
Jan. 2nd, 2019 03:26 amAllegedly inspired by real life privacy laws being passed in England, Mainlining is a government hacking game where you play as a member of the mysterious agency MI7, aka the "Lions". It's okay though, you're the lightly comedy kind of oppressive government. You've even got an agent who exists entirely to be a walking Twin Peaks reference. Ha ha.
You're allowed via the "BLU Pill Act" to hack into any PC you want, but you can only arrest people if you can produce evidence towards one of three charges: Selling illegal items (5 years), Theft of data or physical items (10 years), or the most heinous, life-destroying crime of all... Unlicensed Software Development (25 years).
The anti-government activist group THORNS however is working on counter-hacking the hackers. Can you capture them before...
...well, nothing actually really happens, because here's the thing: Mainlining is way less a hacking game and more of a traditional point and click adventure. If there's a way to game over, I didn't find it, and I tried things like arresting random people out of the phone book a half-dozen times just to see if the newspaper articles accusing MI7 of being incompetent losers ever got more fed up. (They did not.)
So in practice the tiers of arrest serve as self-imposed difficulty levels for the most part. Poke around a little, find someone selling drugs, arrest them for 5. Or you can poke further, discover they're being framed and arrest the framer for a data violation. Or you can push further and arrest the guy who wrote the software that made it possible for the framer to do his work.
There's no branching plotlines based on who you arrest, you just kind of bomf along to the next case.
I went out of my way to investigate everything and finished this in about four hours, so it's not going to strain anybody. However, it's because I went out of my way to investigate everything that I'm not sure I can rec this one very hard.
By the end of the game the typos are out of control (including in MISSION CRITICAL places, which ought to be a showstopper right there), the plot makes less and less sense, and more and more sites are introduced that you SHOULD be able to hack but can't. You'll have a great idea about where to look next and ... oops, no, that site mentioned in an email doesn't actually exist.
I spent a fair amount of time towards the endgame going "Oh. Well that should've worked though?" and that's never something you want people saying about your adventure game. I feel like there was a big scope in mind and they had to cut it down and cut it back for actual release.
Mainlining has a lot of cute ideas about the hacking genre, and it's not a total wash of a game. It's just flawed, and you really really have to know that going in.
You're allowed via the "BLU Pill Act" to hack into any PC you want, but you can only arrest people if you can produce evidence towards one of three charges: Selling illegal items (5 years), Theft of data or physical items (10 years), or the most heinous, life-destroying crime of all... Unlicensed Software Development (25 years).
The anti-government activist group THORNS however is working on counter-hacking the hackers. Can you capture them before...
...well, nothing actually really happens, because here's the thing: Mainlining is way less a hacking game and more of a traditional point and click adventure. If there's a way to game over, I didn't find it, and I tried things like arresting random people out of the phone book a half-dozen times just to see if the newspaper articles accusing MI7 of being incompetent losers ever got more fed up. (They did not.)
So in practice the tiers of arrest serve as self-imposed difficulty levels for the most part. Poke around a little, find someone selling drugs, arrest them for 5. Or you can poke further, discover they're being framed and arrest the framer for a data violation. Or you can push further and arrest the guy who wrote the software that made it possible for the framer to do his work.
There's no branching plotlines based on who you arrest, you just kind of bomf along to the next case.
I went out of my way to investigate everything and finished this in about four hours, so it's not going to strain anybody. However, it's because I went out of my way to investigate everything that I'm not sure I can rec this one very hard.
By the end of the game the typos are out of control (including in MISSION CRITICAL places, which ought to be a showstopper right there), the plot makes less and less sense, and more and more sites are introduced that you SHOULD be able to hack but can't. You'll have a great idea about where to look next and ... oops, no, that site mentioned in an email doesn't actually exist.
I spent a fair amount of time towards the endgame going "Oh. Well that should've worked though?" and that's never something you want people saying about your adventure game. I feel like there was a big scope in mind and they had to cut it down and cut it back for actual release.
Mainlining has a lot of cute ideas about the hacking genre, and it's not a total wash of a game. It's just flawed, and you really really have to know that going in.
