Mu Complex

This used to be such a good game, and I would have recommended this game before, but the code that is needed to proceed on one of the levels is no longer being generated (I'm guessing it's when twitter became x and the developer didn't update the game to account for this), so the game is now unplayable from this point on.

Forcing me to search for old articles (which are behind paywalls) and to read religious texts. Nah bro, i'm here to play a fun puzzler not read religious BS or play "google it" simulator. To make it worse, that background noise (i think they want to call it music / ambience) is awful. Was fun for a few minutes, then it got annoying.

Mu Complex is a "hacker adventure" where your poking onto random terminals have opened up a world of discovery, opportunity, and... a bit of WTF had happened. Some of the puzzles require going into the real world for clues, but it wasn't clear when that was totally necessary, and often, totally anachronistic. And at the end, it relied on a timed puzzle that basically forced me to rage quit.

Some of the puzzles are relatively clever, the former inhabitants left clues that are not visible in regular light, but are visible under blacklight or thermal or IR, as you hack one computer after another, discovering more clues along the way.

But the game went seriously anachronistic when it was supposedly set in the 1960's, but it has a password reset procedure that tells you to access a mail server through URL. Keep in mind that http wasn't invented until 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and team. Another clue later requires clues from a token posted by a Twitter account, which isn't active until 2006! (And the token Twitter account was created 2015!) Yet ANOTHER clue requires research of a real newspaper on Google for a specific page on a specific date in the 1960's.

Some of the puzzles are clever, but the final few puzzles rely on time limits. Do two serious multiplication and addition based on a random number in 30 seconds. There's just not enough time unless you're lightning fast on the calculator AND the keyboard.

And the plot? Hah, derivative. Let's just say the name LYA is very reminiscent of another AI, shall we?

Well, enough said.

Would absolutely be a yes 5 years ago

I've had this game on my wish list for 6 years, waiting for it to go on sale. I have a soft spot for ARGs and these kinds of "hacking" puzzle games, but I'm usually disappointed with the genre. The "hacking" usually boils down to obscuring the game's mechanics behind a severely dumbed down, limited and frustrating command line interface, then forcing you to solve what boils down to sudoku puzzles and anagrams as the meat of the game. I've been a software engineer since the 90s, I'm basically setting myself up for disappointment whenever I play one of these.

This game ended up being pretty much like every other hacking simulator I've played. The first episode was entertaining, although a bit simple. It would have been the perfect length and difficulty for a demo. I was pleasantly surprised when I dropped into a command line and was able to instinctively use "ls" and "cat" to show the contents of a directory and dump a file to the terminal to read it, without having to view the available commands. Oh, and occasionally a file requires root privs to view, so you have to use "sudo" once in a while. Well, that's pretty much where the realism of the shell environment ends. Not to mention the system you're using was supposed to have been built in the early 1960s, well before Unix even existed.

You can "cat" jpgs to view them. ssh works without user names and passwords are stored in text files. You spend the majority of your time interfacing with the terminal, but can't customize the font size, scroll with your mouse wheel or copy/paste. It would have been nice if some of the challenge came from realistically having to socially engineer information, or having to use some kind of packet sniffer or port scanner to illicitly gain knowledge. But instead you basically solve slider puzzles and anagrams, with the terminal and network acting as minor roadblocks to finding all the pieces of the puzzle so you can rearrange them into an answer.

There's one puzzle that requires you to look up a real back issue of a newspaper, which at the time this was released was probably freely available but which is now hidden behind a paywall. You'll now either have to subscribe to the newspaper to view this solution or you'll have to use the Chrome inspector to delete elements from the page to get past the paywall and view a blurry rendition of the image you need. That's the closest thing to "hacking" I did when playing this game, and it's just a matter of time before that probably won't work either.

I got bored about halfway through the second chapter. I could have continued jumping around the serially networked computers to solve the silly ciphers, but I just didn't want to any more.

As far as this kind of "hacking" simulator, still to this day there is no better game than Telehack. It's 100% free and 1000% more realistic, deep and rewarding than anything else I've tried in this genre in the last 10 years. TIS-100 is a close second, if you like solving brain teasers dressed in retro computer wrappings.

As far as Mu Complex, well, I can't say I recommend it.

While the game is actually quite interesting and puzzles are actually fun to do, I just cant recommend it due to one reason, the lack of developer awareness to outside resources this game requests. One puzzle has you looking for something on google, and while that sounds great(and in theory is) you can only get the information off a paid website, which forces you to pretty much look at a guide for answers or some obscure hints given by the community to circumvent this issue. This wasnt the case on release but the website went paid after some time and now is stuck behind that paywall. The community has brought this up and the devs are pretty much ignored it as well as trying to counter the argument. This left a bad taste in my mouth as the game is really short as is.

I wouldn't mind this problem and could look past this one puzzle if the game was quite long, but you can beat the game in less than 2 hours, so having to use a guide for an answer because the answer is pretty much paywalled now and they don't want to do anything about it, is just garbage.

It's a shame, after that one google puzzle the other google style puzzles were way too basic and not very well thought out, essentially boiling down to "search what this word means and type the result". The stuff contained within the game though, such as hacking the computers and going through the levels was actually pretty fun.

There was another puzzle or 2 that required some knowledge of programs outside of the game which was quite annoying to try to figure out, as I knew how to solve the puzzle, but figuring out how to do it required me to basically look up a tutorial on google on how to do something special with a program in my computer(or the requirement to download one if you dont have that function on your pc).

Also, they also said that chapter 3 would release but due to not enough support, they left it at 2 chapters. Eh.

Clunky, slow and not very logical for a puzzle game.
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You start out needing to log in to a computer terminal, what kind of system lets you just ask for the log in password and let you log in with it?

You log in and "finding the password" was treated as a test? It literally only required typing the word password to find it. And the game tells you that it was surprised you could accomplish this; really?

It doesn't really get any better after this. The interface is tiny and can't be adjusted, in fact there's no options for display at all so if you have a large screen you are locked into tiny text and a poor UI design.

The story continues on through more nonsense puzzles like the first one, open a file, find the word you need to enter for the next puzzle, continue. It's mediocre once, and it's tedious if this is the main interaction with the game repeatedly. It's about as fun as using windows explorer to investigate what's taking up space on your hard drive and cleaning out old temp files.

There's so many flaws in the way this is written and the way you interact with it, you sit at a computer terminal but can't even scroll up the window (which has a scroll bar) because it's just a visual gimmick, nah you get to resend commands over again to relist things in the tiny context window.

And even more strange is the game requires you to look up information outside of the game (in another web browser) in order to make progress, but the games not stable enough to stay open all the time when you do. I hit a few puzzles that you needed to go do out-of-game research to pass and the game would crash frequently when it wasn't the focused window. For such a simple game you would think it would be stable, but no.

Game length will also be completely subjective. The actual content (reading material and audio narration) is far less than an hour long. Any length of play-time you get from the game will be browsing for answers (in or out of game) to find the password to the next snippet of narration.

Overall this is a neat idea and I actually do think there might be some people who will enjoy it, but it's going to be a very niche audience and I'm not going to recommend it for most people. It's just not well presented, it's missing basic functional tools and it's insultingly glitchy on top of that.

If you are mildly curious about the story, go look up a speed run for each episode and you'll get to see the entire 10 minutes of game content and the slightly interesting (and easily predictable) ending.
Gee, what always happens when you "free" an AI?

EDIT: I guess I should point out there's a demo just in case you didn't notice, so if you really wanted to see if this is for you, you can try it for free.
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Bottom line: The steam backgrounds for this game are better than the game, and less prone to crashing.
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Nope- I'm done. Eddywolvers, go to hell. I don't mind interesting puzzles, even brain teasers- but clear violation of PEMDAS for the sake of a poorly designed puzzle is just inexcusable.

Bad resolution that cannot be adapted (tiny tiny text), alright puzzles - but without the ability to copy paste its a real drag (and have I mentioned tiny tiny text which breaks your eyes?). Kinda 'meh' - would not recommend to purchase for full price.

So, I generally love hacking games. I even loved this game when it first came out.

But I can't recommend it.

Pros:
-Interesting story
-Well made puzzles (Sort of)
-ARG puzzles that make you think

Cons:
-Not really a hacking simulator. The "hacking" is more of a basis for brain teasers. If you want something far closer to a hacking simulator, I highly recommend either Uplink, Hacknet, or Nite Team 4. Those games, while still puzzles, are FAR closer to the reality of hacking than this is.
-While the puzzles are well made, there's a major caveat to that. Some of the ARG puzzle solutions are no longer accessible. That's one of the dangers of making an ARG based puzzle game and not frequently updating it. This game came out several years ago, and the more heavily reliant you are on ARG based puzzles, the more likely the game will be unplayable without a walkthrough down the line. If you're interested in ARG puzzles, look into The Black Watchmen or any of the games made by Alice & Smith (its developer).

My Major Gripe:
If you look at the game's history, you'll find that the game itself has actually existed for a long time. It was originally released in multiple parts on Kongregate around 2014 as a free web browser game. About a year later, it was successfully greenlit and launched onto Steam. It was then immediately removed from Kongregate. What you are playing here was originally released for free. Now, while that's a scummy thing to do, maybe they were just hoping to push forward with further development, right?

Well, the team launched their website back in late 2014 with an ARG event which required people to unlock the website before it could be viewed. It was, of course, unlocked. The next announced news on the website was in late 2015 with the release of the Steam version. That's the last time they released anything on their website. The last update to the game was in early 2016 with the release of a demo for the game.

They've been radio silent since. Which is a damn shame because after alienating their audience by removing the Kongregate version and throwing a huge stinger into the game's ending for what has to be what they planned for a sequel...there's been nothing for *years*. So the lack of updates to the ARG aren't the only aspect of the game that's been abandoned. It appears the whole project has.

Summary:
If this game is on a huge sale and you REALLY want to play it, go ahead and buy it. If you're interested in ARG puzzle games, there's far better options to select from on Steam (Alice & Smith Games would come highly recommended by me). If you want to play a hacking game, there's a ton of options you can select from that more accurately give you the feel of hacking (Hacknet, Uplink, Nite Team 4). If you appreciate what the developers have made here and want to see more from them, be aware that they've taken some scummy actions towards their community and have been totally radio silent for three years now.

Executive Summary:
Get it on sale if at all. Look into other games if you like the genera.

Interesting idea, but I am sad to say that the execution is lacking. There are some serious quality of life improvements required to make this less frustrating for regular terminal users.

The game (and terminal) doesn't properly resize to fit the resolution (2560x1600), so you are stuck with a lot of scrolling to read stuff that would have comfortably fit on the monitor otherwise. The mouse wheel doesn't work and the scroll handle is tiny and therefore very fiddly. There doesn't even seem to be any keyboard shortcuts for scrolling, which would have been fine, too.

I got through Episode 1 easily enough, but stopped playing during some puzzles in Episode 2 that require typing a lot of rather wordy commands in a very specific order. Failing one of these apparently requires re-typing all of it. The solution was easy, but extremely tedious to enter. This, combined with the lack of context (due to the small window and lack of halfway decent scrolling) made it frustrating enough for me to just quit right there.

My experience with the puzzles is limited by the fact that I stopped playing, but most puzzles so far seem to consist out of rather repetitively digging through emails, finding a clue and entering the result. Sometimes it also requires you to Google for some piece of text that the clue references to find the answer. Also, this is nowhere near a "full-featured hacker" experience. There is only a handful of limited commands, and you could probably just brute-force your way through all of it.

I would have liked to know how the story ends, but in its current state, I am not willing to put more time into it to find out.

This game requires considerable computing knowledge outside of the universe of the game: image manipulation programs; codes; maps; screenshots; etc. It is not self-contained.

At one point, I thought that my impaired hands would prevent me from completing a puzzle in time because I could not type fast enough. However, I found a solution that gained me an extra badge for overcoming this disability. Sometimes, having a disability makes one a better problem-solver.

I would recommend this game for other senior citizens even though the fonts can be hard to read at times. Maybe I should just swallow my pride and wear my glasses at all times.

Fortunately, there is considerable useful help available for when I got stuck in certain puzzles. Having to consult that does hurt my pride at times. I would rather have a puzzle game that is self-contained and consistent in its rules.

The game was mostly enjoyable for me. I have learnt a lot from the game and from the contributors to the community forums. Thank you.

I don't really know how I feel about this game. I have been waiting for a while for it to go on sale and jumped on it this Xmas Sale cycle.

In summary, the game advertises itself as a "hacking" game with a linux CLI. This is a far stretch as the Linux commands are extremely limited and only certain ones are available on specific machines.

The base game was not very diffcult; I finished both Episode 1 and 2 in just over 2 hours. I actually spent most of my time just trying to get all of the achievement badges, which the 4 hidden ones were actually the most interesting of all of the puzzles.

Not sure that this game has any replayability value. Aside from getting the achievements, the puzzles don't change per run through.

All in all, I want to really like this game... and for buck it did entertain me for a few hours. But once I have finished writing this review, I will uninstall it from my computer and not play it again. That statement alone makes it hard for me to recommend to anyone for any price.

Definetely a fun little game. The puzzles are interesting and its always fun to have games that does stuff out of the game (like doing google searches, map coordinates etc). The command lines based gameplay also provides a "geeky" feel to the gameplay. The endings and secrets and also pretty amusing (though I kinda expected the standard ending, too much of Portal and AI's that feels a lot like GLaDOS I guess :P)

Right at the start I have to say, that if you don't like looking in dozens of files for data (at the start) or hints for data (at the end), you're gonna hate this game, because it's mostly that. Reading and reading, and then reading again to be sure you haven't missed anything when you get stuck.

But if you can overcome that, Mu Complex is one of the greatest think-outside-of-the-box games I've ever seen. You can't find everything in the game itself, you have to use internet, math or maps to succeed and you have to find out when is the time.

I've played this game back when it was free on Kongregate and even though I still feel cheated about it being taken down, I've payed for it, replayed it and had the same amount of fun and challenge as before.

P.S. If you want to see the ultimate challenge, look what we had to go through when we were waiting for episode 2 here.

A breath of fresh air for the genre. At one point I had google, excel, a piece of paper and pen to solve the game's puzzles. Good fun!

As a computer science student this game feels me with joy, it has a linux based command terminal and rewarding puzzles.
The story is also intriguing and quite fascinating, but above all you use real world knowledge and encourages you to learn new things using the internet. From data encryption to philosophy this game is 10/10.

I am a software engineer and a gamer, so this game immediately became a 'must buy' for me. Having played through the first two episodes (can't wait for the third), I can say that this may be the best hacking game I have ever played.

The game really does make you feel like a hacker, as you're dropped onto a linux-like environment with a terminal and desktop. All while you have a really sweet electronic music playing as a part the games sound track. If you wanted to feel like Neo, this game is the one.

The puzzles are really sweet. Why? The game forces you to use "outside resources" to solve some of the puzzles - ie: using google maps, searching wikipedia to figure out musical notes, all to deconstruct a timed puzzle. Oh, and yes, the puzzles had me streaming all kinds of profanities at times - a good sigh the puzzles are well made.

Unlike other hacking games, this one is fully voiced. THANK YOU.

The graphics are clean, minimalist and sharp. Exactly the right combo for this sort of game.

There is a 'good' story for what it is, and the cliff hangers after each episode have me yearning for more.

Buy this, even if you're only mildly interested in the subject of computers, or if you're just into puzzles. Even if you think the game might feel a bit to challenging, because each puzzle solved is rewarded with an amazing sense of joy.

TL;DR: Great concept, lousy execution.

Before I begin, you should know I'm coming to this game from the perspective of an adept Linux user. The terminal is where I live. So when I read that we'd be using "actual Linux commands" to solve hacking puzzles, I wouldn't click buy fast enough. Unfortunately, "actual Linux commands" essentially meant ultra stripped-down versions of ls, cat, ssh and sometimes sudo.

The puzzles themselves were decently creative, but way too simple. About 90% of the puzzles could be solved with some variation on the form (1) read the emails for clues then (2) type in the password to unlock the username / password for the next computer . About half the puzzles require a simple Google search which seemed cool about twice before it got annoying. Overall, the puzzle aspect felt formulaic and underdeveloped.

Some nice work went into writing the emails between the office workers and I enjoyed getting to know the story through that device. Everything from the story/atmosphere perspective was VERY solid.

I think there's a ton of potential in this type of game, especially for teaching people about how to use Linux. It just needs more work to make people really have to work to solve the puzzles. Codesleuthing is tons of fun, but it just doesn't feel fair when your puzzle is as simple as translating morse code or maritime signal flags. Also, there's no reason this game shouldn't have had a better terminal emulator. More terminal options would have meant more complex and satisfying puzzles.

Overall, it's a fun diversion for a couple hours, but that's about it. It definitely isn't $9 of entertainment. I think this developer is definitely on the right track and I look forward to their next release, but this game can easily be skipped.

Big Review Update:

General:
I love this game, the way you have to think way outside of the box to solve the puzzles is just amazing. I definitely want more games like this.
And to clarify this version of the game has the first and second episode of MuComplex that where previously on kongregate.
I do not know how a possible release of a third episode might be handled.

As much as I love the game, the way the steam release has been handled was pretty bad. The free version was shut down without much prior warning and for the way the port was done its a bit expensive.

About the Port:
It's basically still the same game as before. to my current knowledge only 2 things were added(hints that unlock after a certain time and some additional puzzle after beating both episodes) No gamechanging fetures were added. They even removed something substantial(ctrl+v) which made one of the puzzles difficult to solve.
Some features that could definitely not have hurt to add would be to make the terminal resizeable, allow you to open more than just one picture and let you resize and move those freely on the screen. Also there are no game options of any kind, you just get a small button to turn the complete audio on or off. It's pretty disappointing.


At last some praise:
*love the concept
*voice acting is kinda ok
*the end of episode 2 has a nice little cgi cutscene
*there are a lot of emails that are not necessary for puzzle solving, they add a nice atmosphere to the game and let you look into the workings of the mu complex

Pros and cons are probably the easiest way to help you make a decision on purchase MU Complex.

Pros:
Satisfying Linux command line based game play.
The puzzles are satisfying:
-Real world information puzzles that requires you to use Google.
-External MU Complex owned websites to solve puzzles are a nice touch.
The story is interesting.

Cons:
Having to retype commands many times over when stuck on a puzzle (A note pad can help relieve this)
I don't really like the sound track but it can be muted.
Everyone seems to save their passwords in a document called password.txt
While the "About the game" section leads you to believe you will become a "real hacker" I doubt this game will give you any real world hacker experience.
The console window does not support the mouse scroller

Overall the cons are fairly minor and don't take anything away from the experience and I consider the game put together well. I recommend this game to people the enjoy puzzle games and visual novel style games.

Constructive criticism:
I think there is a missed opportunity to support dual monitors.