Hacked: The Streamer Review

Hacked: The Streamer tells the story of game streamer PinkyPie who just successfully signed a new sponsorship who receives a menacing message when starting a stream after some banter with her friends and moderators. Someone is blackmailing the streamer for $50 000 in order to not leak personal videos of her and her ex. By interacting with her friends. brother and ex, it’s up to you find clue and figure out is the blackmailer.

Hacked: The Streamer is an interactive movie where players will be faced with multiple conversational choices in order to learn more about PinkyPie’s friends and pick up clues that will allow you to find the culprit. As with similar games, each decision opens up a branching path in the overall story.

Having multiple branching paths is a nice feature that encourages replay as it will allow you to explore the complete story. One of the differences with other similar games, Hacked: The Streamer introduced a few mini-games like mechanics.

During the protagonist’s in-game stream, you’ll be prompted to move a cursor to a hand on the screen (your moderators will give you hints) and mash the A button to “help” the streamer complete the game’s actions. Or during set sequences, you’ll need to a chose an item on your desk that will open up a path and deep dive into a relationship with one of the characters.

Given that this is basically an interactive movie, there’s nothing wrong with the visuals. It looks real. Also the games that the streamer plays during the game do look great and actually made me want to play them in real life. Some of the text typed by protagonist contains typos. But on the audio side, I can understand these are amateur actors, but some interactions sound phoned in.

One the issue with Hacked: The Streamer is the lack of a proper Streamer mode like other similar games. Streamer move removes the timer that appears before making a decision as it allows people to get chat interaction when streaming this genre. Also, for some reason, once you’ve made a decision, you still have to wait for the countdown to end; it’s not like you can change your decision. Also if you want to experience the branching paths, you need to restart the game; you can’t pick up wherever and make a different choice.

As a fan of the genre, I enjoyed my time with Hacked: The Streamer. It mixes interactive movie with light detective work in order to find the culprit. The story is interesting and you’re really wanting to find out who the blackmailer is. However the lack of Streamer mode forces you to make quick decisions and while a nice try, the button mashing sequences don’t add much. It’s not on the same level as Wales Interactive’s projects but it’s a great attempt at the genre. It’s apparently the first Hacked game in an anthology and am looking forward to the next chapter.