Hacker culture is pretty well exposed these days. In between the paranoid fever dream of Mr Robot and the myriad of indie games attempting to recreate the fascinating sub culture, along with all that real-world stuff of whistle blowers and Edward Snowden and privacy debates, the dystopia written at the birth of the Internet seems to be slowly coming to life. As a society we lurch closer to living in a dystopian cyberpunk story ourselves and it seems that more and more we should be just as worried about protecting ourselves online as we should in the real world. So, good thing, then, that we have video games to help us escape that very real hell and sweep us away to… oh, wait. Hang on a minute. This is a review of hackmud, the grimly paranoid hacker simulation from one-man-band Sean Gubelman of Drizzly Bear studios, and it’s as real, as dark and as mysterious as you’d expect.