My Brother Hacker

Story

Your brother said he tested security for companies. The kind of work that's better off not talked about. It sounded boring and believable, so you never pushed. Two weeks after he disappeared, the police handed his things back to your parents. Among them was a USB stick. You plug it into the home computer. An unfamiliar system installs itself, and a moment later Mentor speaks to you: an AI that teaches you to hack from scratch. How it got onto that stick, you'll understand much later.

The whole game takes place on a single desktop, a hacker's operating system from the year 2036. You find your targets the way someone genuinely searching would: you read. A handle from someone's profile leads to a forgotten site from years back. The site gives up a name, the name gives up an IP address. Only then do you connect.

The break-in itself is methodical and tense. You scan ports and crack them one by one, watching the progress bar climb. You hop between nodes and listen for hidden machines, and the right exploit slips you past a firewall. Sometimes the intrusion detection system wakes up and fights back: your proxy against theirs, in real time, until one of them runs out of memory. Then you take what you came for, wipe the logs and disconnect. Every one of those moves has a price.

You hack from your room at your parents' place in Gdańsk. Every mistake leaves a trace, and the traces add up across the entire game. There is no button that clears them. The higher the heat climbs, the closer someone gets to knocking, and it won't be your door, it will be your parents'. You want the same thing your brother wanted: earn enough for a place of your own and drop off the radar before you cause real trouble. But the longer you follow his trail, the harder it is to tell whether you're still looking for your brother or turning into him.

What to expect:

• - Terminal and mouse do the same thing. Type the command or click it, your call.

  - Recon happens in the living internet of 2036: social media, email, job boards, a private police force with its most-wanted list. This is your case file.

  - Heat never resets. Consequences arrive on a delay, as posts, emails and changes in the world around you.

  - A black market for tools and hardware. Better CPU, better odds.

  - You set the pace. The tension comes from risk, not from a clock.

  - 2036 here is five minutes from today: digital identity, biometrics, protests against eID, corporations woven into daily life. A lot happens in what's left unsaid.

From the developer

I always wanted to make games, but life went the way it usually goes: work, bills, and the dream on hold until "someday". I work in a warehouse, and that's where my characters are born, somewhere between one task and the next. Then I go home and build them into the game.

When AI models arrived, I started learning how they work, every day, at home and at work. At some point I understood that "someday" can be now. That's how My Brother Hacker started. It's the game I waited years for someone to make, so in the end I'm making it myself.

I won't hide it: AI helps me. Without it, this would take me a good ten years. But AI didn't invent this game. Every quest, every mechanic and every character comes from me, and I sit with every generated image until it fits, down to the detail.

This isn't an assembly line project. It's my dream, built in the open, and I'm glad you're here from the start.

Add it to your wishlist. I'll let you know when it's ready.