Hack'n'Slash is a really strange mix - on the surface, it might look like a zelda game - with bombs, boomerangs and hearts - but it's actually a programming puzzle game where the hacking refers to actually modifying the source code - programmed in LUA - of the game. At first you can only edit the public values of game objects - like if a door is open or closed - but as the game goes, you get many powers which allow you to completely crash the world if you so desire. The hacking aspect of the game is amazing, the moving around and slashing, not as much.
I'm really impressed by the framework they've created for this game, you have a sword that you can swing to hack anything with USB ports - enemies, blocks, gates, etc. - and by doing so, you can solve puzzles that range from the very simple to the devious. The puzzles get increasingly more difficult when they allow you to dive into the subroutines that the game uses to make the world go. For instance, one puzzle makes half of a bridge and you can't cross to the other side. Diving into the code of the bridge, you see that it uses a function called "isEven()" to determine what pieces of the bridge it should raise. You can then dive into the "isEven()" function and see that it checks the modulo of the number, and then returns true if it's even, false if it's not. You can hack it so it returns true either way. That kind of puzzle.
Although I'm in love with the puzzles, moving around is kind of weird, you can make yourself immortal by hacking a flag to give you more hearts, or you can just hack enemies so they heal you instead when they attack. You can fall off some ledges and it takes a few second to bring you back into the world without anything lost except time - and all ledges should more or less have guards on them so you don't fall, especially when they're weird diagonals and jagged lines and you can hack your movement speed to go really fast. And the block pushing puzzles are a bit annoying because once you've solved one, you've solved them all. You can push blocks in negative amounts to 'pull' them, and besides that there isn't much else to do with blocks, but the game throws them at you constantly.
I feel that this game would've been better as a pure programming puzzle game where you moved around with the mouse and just solved programming puzzles. It could've still be zelda-themed and still be called hack'n'slash, but the focus would have been placed on the puzzle solving and not on the inventory management and the awkward moving around trying to hack ravens and turtles. As it is, I've been frustrated with the backtracking and moving around to try and see where the next puzzle would be and I've solved at least once puzzle by glitching it, but at least the puzzles are pretty cool. Hack'n'slash could almost be a programming educational tool.
If you have the smallest inkling of interest for programming, give hack'n'slash a try, there aren't many games like this one that incorporate actual elements of scripting into the core gameplay. It's so integrated, you can crash the world if you try.
