EXAPUNKS

The year is 1997. You used to be a hacker, but now you have the phage. You made a deal: one hack, one dose. There’s nothing left to lose… except your life.

EXAPUNKS is a programming, puzzle and hacking game developed and published by Zachtronics.
Released on October 22nd 2018 is available in English on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

It has received 1,710 reviews of which 1,620 were positive and 90 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9 out of 10. 😍

The game is currently priced at 9.75€ on Steam and has a 50% discount.

The Steam community has classified EXAPUNKS into these genres:

Programming Puzzle Hacking Automation Indie Simulation Logic Cyberpunk Singleplayer Difficult Great Soundtrack Sandbox

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at EXAPUNKS through various videos and screenshots.

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Requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS *: Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 10
Processor: 2.0 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1366 x 768
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 660 MB available space

MacOS

OS: macOS 10.9+
Processor: 2.0 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1366 x 768
Storage: 690 MB available space

Linux

OS: Ubuntu 16.04+, SteamOS
Processor: 2.0 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL 3.3, 1366 x 768
Storage: 720 MB available space

Reviews

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

Nov. 2024

I initially didn't like this much, but after playing TIS-100 and Shenzhen-IO, I grew to appreciate it a lot more. This is definitely the best of those three direct programming zachtronics games The constraints in this game are unbelievably more lax than those two: you have no time limit, no code limit, and two general purpose registers. Both of those games have some way to work around the ridiculously parsimonious register count, in stack nodes and ram modules, but in EXAPUNKS, files are a lot more flexible than these As a result of having more powerful tools and fewer restrictions, the problems you solve in EXAPUNKS tend to be more complicated than the other games, but usually not more difficult. I found most of them to be really easy actually, but as usual the bonus campaign includes some really interesting puzzles The best bonus puzzles add additional interesting restrictions, like "can only have one exa in the network at once", or "exas may die when crossing links". It would be really great if these challenges were more widely distributed. Optimizing size/time is often not that interesting, the latter relies heavily on loop unrolling and the former ... maybe I'm just too dumb for it So why didn't I initially like this game? I think the story is really clunkily integrated and a lot of the mechanics are not explored as deeply as I would have liked The retro-futuristic world is cool enough, but your dialog options literally don't matter at all and you can't selectively interact with npcs whenever you want outside of cutscences. You can't interact with the chat room, but the other members immediately react to all your hacks, gas up your performance in hacker battles, and even comment on how you are "only lurking". If Ember will just say and do the same thing no matter what dialog option you pick, and the sentiments are often all the same, why even have the choices? None of Ember's reveals are surprising, and it doesn't make sense why it needs you to do the hacks instead of being able to do them itself since they are pretty easy. If the dialogs did not have options, I wouldn't really be bothered by them, but I don't like the fake choices at all. And staring at the editor can get tiresome, so it would be nice if you could actually chat to the other characters whenever you want, instead of just rewatching cutscenes, even if they just had like two extra text lines between cutscenes The hacker battles are also disappointing to me. Because "thinking" instructions take up just as much time as "working" instructions, you can't respond to your environment and have to lock in a strategy ahead of time. Against a real person there would in theory be some rock paper scizzors and metagaming at play here since you could try to guess your opponent's strategy and counter it, but most choices are pretty random so you wouldn't get much of an advantage this way, and in practice the npc hacker battles have a locked in, passive, inefficient strategy, so if you just execute the task with unrolled loops and no agression (kill), you'll win with S or S+. Also in hacker battles where there could be an alternate strategy like clogging a server with dropped files, that strategy is banned Finally, it would have been cool to have some kind of self modifying code The solitare is not really fun, but hack and mash is really good. The version in last call bbs is a bit better though, and it also comes with dungeons and diagrams which is my favorite side-game If you like programming games, I would recommend untrusted, a javascript browser game where you have to edit select modifiable parts of the game's source code to progress, and escape from pwny island, which is just an actual capture the flag disguised as an mmo game. In untrusted, the code gives you a good idea of how you might actually structure a simple 2d ascii art adventure game, and you're allowed to do anything you want to the parts of code you can edit, so it's pretty easy if you know javascript, but fun. Pwny island I have not actually played, but it literally gives you a real basic open source mmo and asks you to find and exploit security vulnerabilities in it that are based on real issues found in games like minecraft etc. It kind of ties back to zachtronics with the infiniminer source code leak and subsequent exploits :(. Definitely a much higher level of hacking difficulty, but also unparalleled hacking realism, since the exploits are actual exploits that have existed in actual games

Oct. 2024

Zachtronics developed a lot of these 'assembly code' games, and I think this one was the best execution of the concept. While I enjoyed the others a lot, TIS was very bare-bones and Shenzhen was too complex and varied in its objectives. I think this game struck a great balance in challenge, visual feedback, and I liked the story as well

Aug. 2024

Assembly code game goodness TIS100 evolved into Shenzhen I/O, Shenzhen I/O evolved into Exapunks. Great game, fun puzzles, and educational to boot! Redshift coding and hacker battles elevates this to my favourite Zachtronics game, at least among the coding ones (Magnum Opus is a different beast entirely) ;------------------------------------------- Making it through the story feels like being reborn in fire. I have ascended. My neurons are throbbing. Thank you, Zachtronics. Now I'll go study actual programming

April 2024

My favorite Zachtronics game and one of the finest engineering games ever made. The hardware has a lot of depth to it that you come to master over time. You'll realize that sections of the manual you initially glossed over, were actually hinting at something very useful and very deep. By the end of it you'll look at problems very differently and get to a better solution on your first try. Strongly recommend, this game will actually make you smarter.

Jan. 2024

A Very good microcosm of my programming life: Step 1: Fascination and being able to solve puzzles and construct the programming Step 2: Rapidly moving beyond my ability to comprehend how the code works in a functional way Step 3: Copying other people's code to brute force my way through.

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