Some games come along that, once you clock eyes on them, you know you have to play it. GRIDbeat was one such title that instantly spoke to me thanks to its truly unique feature of hacking to the beat of the music. I was extremely pleased to see a demo was available (and still is), which demonstrated just how deep it goes into a hacker’s world, and it only cemented my need to play the full game.
Developed by Ridiculous Games, a studio founded in 2017 and full of veteran developers who have mostly worked together since the 1990s, they have crafted a callback to the late 80s and 90s hacking scene in wonderful detail that pays homage to the era perfectly. From the neon aesthetic to the synth-based soundtrack, it truly felt like I was back in time, attempting to hone my skills at dodging a plethora of computer-based dangers on an old-school system.
The game is seen through your character’s viewpoint as they sit at a terminal to do their work. The CRT effect has been wonderfully created on screen, from the curvature to the corners to its slight dome-like centre, but thankfully doesn’t share the same fuzziness or scanlines of the tech, giving us a much cleaner look to the visuals. I very much appreciated the times I could see the reflection of my character on the screen too, a really nice detail that immersed me more so into the game.
Your nameless character has been tasked with hacking into a mainframe to retrieve a data core by a client. But once you do so, it becomes increasingly more difficult to escape, which sets you on a path through multiple servers (and a USB drive) to try and escape the mainframe with your bounty intact. A narrative is woven through the game mostly through emails you find and extract and through your AI companion Dot.
The further you go and the more digging you do into the company you’ve hacked, the more sinister they seem to be, to the point that if you can’t stop them in their plans, they may well end the world, and it turns out you are in the best position to stop them from completing their evil goals.
Doing this will require you to move your diamond-shaped cursor to the beat of the music (Crypt of the NecroDancer style) to manoeuvre around server boards to find an exit to the next server of the mainframe. Each of the seven servers is broken down into different sections, bringing their own challenges, with a boss waiting for you at the very end of each server. Your mission is to get yourself through these areas to escape the mainframe you’ve found yourself trapped in.
But, of course, it’s not as easy as that, as you’ll have to break down firewalls that are in your way, avoid viruses that could wipe you entirely, deal with torrent programs, avoid format wipes, glitches, finding update ports, and deep hack programs, and avoid a very annoying mini.tor file program. These are all dealt with in various ways, with some using small mini-games, which made the gameplay much more fun and less tiresome than it has the potential for. I was in my element exploring the servers, vibing to the music and using my hidden hacking skills to the best of my ability.
If you move against the beat of the music, you’ll start to lose health (which is represented by a data bar) that, if depleted, will see you wiped from the server, and you’ll have to try again. Hitting a firewall before clearing it will see you go out of sync, and with other dangers out to deplete your data, it does become quite the challenging game, especially when a lot of these elements are thrown at you in quick succession. Thankfully you can find data points that will replenish a section of data, and if you are really lucky, you’ll uncover a backup program that will start you where you died instead of back at the start of the sector you’re exploring.
Each sector of a server also has a certain amount of collectibles for you to find, including numerous ‘bits’ to collect, emails to download and so on. Each level also features tasks that are achieved after certain criteria are met. The more you find, collect and complete, the more space you unlock in your storage, which comes in very handy with the varying programs you’ll need to install to aid your escape.
Unlocking these programs as you go, it becomes a little bit of a juggling act to have the needed programs installed for a particular section. Thankfully these can be swapped out on the fly, so it’s not too much of an issue. These programs give you new abilities, including slashing at certain parts of the server to reveal new paths or to destroy enemies, crashing certain elements of the server to clear blockages or to stun enemies, or you can install the track program to have a handy guide to hidden bonuses.
This is all wrapped up in beautifully bright neon-lit visuals that delight at every turn. The detail to bring this digital world to life is impeccable; it really felt like I was exploring these computerised virtual worlds. The sound design is also worthy of a mention, with the old-school 56k modem dial-up effects present to hearing the keyboard getting its work cut out while you’re hacking a firewall. Everything felt and looked right, and the work done is very commendable.
So the fundamentals are here for an engaging and gripping experience, but there was one obstacle that I couldn’t get over with my time with GRIDbeat, and that was the execution of its challenge and checkpoints. There is always demanding level design and obstacles running through the game, even near to the start. This expectedly ramps up nearer to the end of the game, but I was struggling to keep up with what I was being asked to do. There were instances that by the time I had comprehended what I needed to do, I had already failed, as the button inputs needed from me while also still trying to keep to the beat were too much for my brain to handle.
I’ll admit I wasn’t the best at the game; many times I had fluked my way through to an exit, and even dropping the difficulty down to ‘chill’ still didn’t help me in the latter part of the game. With no accessibility options available apart from those difficulty levels, I did feel quite deflated that I couldn’t master these later areas.
The other reason for these feelings came from how the game treats its checkpoints. Restarting you right at the start of the section of the server you’re on meant that if I died near to the end, I had to retrace my steps from the start multiple times. It got quite boring in the end, and it was a cause for me to put the game down. There are those backups that I mentioned earlier, but it will restart you where you died only once, and then you’re back to the start again. If there was even just a mid-level checkpoint, or the option to toggle a mid-level checkpoint on/off, then that frustration and deflation would disappear.
