Quadrilateral Cowboy Critic Reviews

The latest from the creator of Gravity Bone and Atom Zombie Smasher is a weird and heartfelt espionage adventure you won't soon forget.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a strange, fantastic journey that will likely charm and test you in equal measure. I expect to come back to it many times over the next few months despite having completed it, searching the environments for nuggets of the story hidden away in the corners of each level and striving to become the best thief this side of cyberspace.

There are no other games like Quadrilateral Cowboy, and it will likely stay that way. It’s a unique blend of computer science, puzzles, and beautiful storytelling that could only come from Blendo Games.

Quadrilateral Cowboy succeeds in astonishing ways: It makes you feel like an incredibly accomplished computer hacker and agent of espionage. It creates an eccentric, thorough world that feels good to exist in and creates characters you can empathise with, despite the lack of a clear plot thread. Quadrilateral Cowboy presents you with a spectrum of moments, and each moment makes you feel great.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is the perfect mix of cybercrime and cyberpunk, that trades in the darker, hard-edged aesthetic of Mr. Robot and Uplink for something that's infinitely more charming and endearing.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is one of those pleasant surprises, adding new depth to the puzzle genre and injecting a little bit of charm in between the heists.

If you like puzzles, it's a game you have to play. Clever, original and really well designed, Quadrilateral Cowboy is yet another proof of the talent of Bento Games.

Quadrilateral Cowboy's hacking mechanics are open to anyone, even if you have never typed any command into a DOS-like shell before. It is a great game, but when it will be all done you'll probably want more of it because the missions never let you really experiment with the hacking terminal and other tools.

With Quadrilateral Cowboy, Chung eschews the filmic jump-cuts he experimented with in Thirty Flights of Loving. Still, the fragmented plot produces a similar result: as it happens, it already feels like a collection of memories.

Quadrilateral Cowboy’s puzzles are mostly a joy to play. Its command line hacking is surprisingly accessible and pleasingly tactile, and when combined with its many interesting gadgets it allows for plenty of creative problem-solving and freedom in tackling all manner of whimsical cybercrime.

Quadrilateral Cowboy's fascination with precision is only matched by its fondness for personalized anarchy. Imagine the empowerment of executing a line of effective and largely improvised code combined with the ignorance that you're just moments away from shooting yourself in the head. At its best, Quadrilateral Cowboy is all of the fun and experimentation of retro-future cyber heists without all of the existential horror that comes with most definitions of mortality.

It's clear Blendo is hoping other players take these toys and run with them; there is, in fact, a large button that reads "Mods" right there on the main menu. But as it stands now, Quadrilateral Cowboy feels like a wonderfully designed class in a beautiful, fascinating school that stops just short of showing how much fun you can have after graduation.

Despite a mind-boggling choice to switch things up drastically midway, Quadrilateral Cowboy is an innovative puzzler that plays with both the angles of hacking and heist films in a terrific way, making for something that those who enjoy brain-teasers with a bit of spice will enjoy.

A few technical issues aside, Quadrilateral Cowboy is a clever puzzle game bursting with personality.

I can easily recommend Quadrilateral Cowboy, one of my favorite indie games so far this year, to anyone looking for an adventure game that brings something that feels fresh and new to the table and leaves you feeling smart as you've become a hacking god, or in this case goddess.

It’s effortlessly cool, from a slightly nerdy retro perspective, but hidden beneath that, there’s a simple and very ordinary feeling tale of a trio of kickass women living outside the law and pulling off ever more outlandish heists.

A game about conducting heists from behind a pc screen? It sure sounds mundane and complicated. Blendo Games though, have somehow managed to pull it off with ease in Quadrilateral Cowboy. They’ve put together a highly polished, surprisingly enjoyable product - one which every gamer should at least consider playing at some point.

Smart, engaging, and memorable.

One of the best hacking-themed video games ever, and a clever puzzler with some surprisingly successful storytelling elements.

It might be too short and a bit clunky, but Blendo Games’ newest effort finds joy in the weird and wonderful retro-future world of 1980s coding.