REVIEW

Quadrilateral Cowboy Review

by Ford James, August 8th, 2016

The night is young. Below, the headlights on the highways look like tiny yellow ants. In front of you, a portable turret is connected to your laptop pointing through an open window of the skyrise apartment you’re attempting to infiltrate. Your fingers clack on the keyboard: “blink 2 fire; pitch 0.8”. You pack up the laptop and CCTV camera displaying the view of the gun and open the first door to go inside. You blink twice and the gun fires, pinging against the button to deactivate the security laser so you can safely enter the ground floor, find the secret entrance to the bookcase, steal the safe and escape.

That’s the gist of Quadrilateral Cowboy, a game that has taken Blendo Games four years to develop. You are a hacker and a thief, with a whole range of tools at your disposal. Not all are available to you straight away; missions must be completed before you’re granted a shopping trip to a black market tech store, ran by a cat who loves his 20s music and dramatic reveals as your purchase opens up. You’re then teleported to a training area to practice using your newly acquired gadget, which is a huge help compared to relying on the in-game manual.

Despite the execution of the sequence earlier taking around 30 seconds at most, you’ll spend considerably longer casing the joint, figuring out exactly how you’re going to infiltrate the guarded building and experimenting with exactly what tools are required for this specific job. Previous attempts included parkouring through a tiny open window to no avail, along with deploying a tiny robot dog, also known as a Weevil that you can control from the safety of your terminal and CCTV monitor to send him scouting ahead since he’s small enough to avoid triggering the lasers.

All of this takes place in a futuristic, steampunk world where augmented limbs are commonplace alongside hoverbikes and security airships. Inspiration is clearly taken from two of their previous titles, Thirty Flights of Loving and Gravity Bones with blocky characters and basic albeit stylish aesthetics. As you trial and error your way through the various environments, a portable vinyl player is always in your back pocket with the option of classic tunes such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” by The Southern Four and “Auld Lang Syne” by Frank Stanley. Aside from the melodic tunes, the rest of the game is fairly silent since you’re operating during the night.

Placing your set up is a clunky process, ensuring your tower of CCTV televisions is in your peripheral vision so you can guide your Weevil safely past obstacles. Once you’re comfortable though, it’s a fantastic introduction to coding in general. I have very little experience with coding personally, understanding the gist of it and doing a few beginner courses on Python, but everything in Quadrilateral Cowboy clicked very quickly. Each mission gradually introduces more concepts and commands with a smooth difficulty curve and solving the latter heists makes you feel like the smartest person in the world, for a few fleeting seconds until you see the next objective.

The beauty of controlling most of the gameplay through a command line is queueing up your actions. Something like “blink 3 gate3.open(3); wait(5); gate2.open(3); wait(3); door5.open(3);” will open gate 3 as soon as you blink three times, wait for five seconds, then open gate 2, pause for another three seconds and then open the final door. Timing it exactly right means you can execute the command at the start of the mission and as you approach each obstacle, it’ll magically open in front of you.

Unfortunately though in my experience playing Quadrilateral Cowboy, multiple missions were marred due to bugs and glitches; some of them game breaking. One instance was the entire game crashing when collecting the aforementioned robot dog at the end of a specific level, while other bugs are simply distracting like the CCTV feed being duplicated and magnified onto the city skyline in front of the player. Given that the game was made nearly entirely by one person, Brendon Chung, I’m fairly surprised I didn’t stumble across more issues but nonetheless, it was quite frustrating running into so many issues. Brendon did think ahead though, with a simple in-game bug reporting feature in the pause menu; a simple description of the issue at hand and he’ll presumably attempt to fix it as soon as he can. Until he does though, be prepared to encounter a range of different bugs and crashes.

Aside from technical issues, the length of the single player campaign is the only other major problem. With a total playtime of around four and a half hours, I was left longing for considerably more when I was done. It’s plain to see a lot of love and care went into creating the game, and while the content that exists is fantastic, it ends all too abruptly. Steam Workshop support exists and some incredible levels will no doubt be created as more creative players get their hands on the game. Relying on the creativity of the community rather than the developer themselves feels somewhat disappointing though, especially since the price point is £14.99. On the flipside however, the foundation has been laid to create some incredible levels. There is so much untapped potential here with the sky essentially being the limit in terms of the programs and commands that can be executed with your gadgets.

Speedrunning could also viably take off with Quadrilateral Cowboy. You’re given a time as soon as you complete a level, with penalties such as falling to your death or triggering alarms but unfortunately the global leaderboards aren’t yet activated, meaning you can only compare times and scores with your friends. Combining commands and executing the perfect run through a level is achievable, but only by the most dedicated of players.

Quadrilateral Cowboy has lost my interest for now as I’ve beaten the single player once, but there’s no doubt I’ll return once the leaderboards go live and more content is introduced via Steam Workshop. It’s a cute and impressively clever puzzle game that will have you scratching your head on more than one occasion, but grinning like a loon once you figure out the optimal solution.