Hacked: The Streamer Review (PC)

If I see an FMV, choose-your-own-adventure type game in my inbox, you can be sure I’ll be down for checking it out. I’ve enjoyed a decent range over the last few years, so when Button Interactive’s debut title Hacked: The Streamer dropped on my desk, you know I was on the case straight away. There’s a little more to Hacked, in that we need to gather clues to find the hacker as we play, which isn’t as straightforward as we thought. 

The story follows streamer Beril, known by her alias PinkiePie. Her channel is on the rise, and having just gained her first big sponsor, she settles in for a celebration stream with her moderation team and her growing fanbase. However, things soon take a turn with one viewer threatening to expose PinkiePie via a series of personal revelations. Known as Birdie on Discord, this apparent hacker wants $50,000 from her or they’ll release revealing videos. 

And so, the game is afoot. We learn early on that Birdie is someone within PinkiePie’s close circle, and must find out who among her six suspects is the culprit. Is it her ex-boyfriend, best friend, or one of her moderators? Or someone else not in the immediate line of fire?

As we go through scenes, we get dialogue choices to naturally veer the story one way or another. For example, we can be rude to ex-boyfriend Ömer at the risk of pissing him off and cutting off more questioning, or we can accuse the moderator while they are seemingly trying to help us. 

At just three chapters, Hacked: The Streamer is a short tale, which is good for replays. Doubly so, as in order to gain the required evidence to accuse someone we need to replay the entire story again. Should we accuse the wrong person, we can go back to the final choice and choose again, but if we lack the evidence to throw at them then the only option is a fresh start. 

This is fine for the most part, but what we really need to see in Hacked: The Streamer is a proper way to review what choices we have previously made. At the end of each chapter we get a story tree showing what we have chosen, but there are two problems with it. Firstly, it’s far too small on screen with no way to zoom in, making it hard to read the text and get an idea of what choices we made. I first played the game through on the Xbox Ally X and could not make out any of the story tree, even the pictures were too small to see clearly. However, even on a 24-inch desktop monitor, it’s too hard to read properly. 

Secondly, there’s no way to see the story tree again after we continue past it. If we could pause mid-game and check our route, or even on the title screen like a lot of similar titles, that’d be ideal. As it is, we have to make a mental note of what we’ve chosen, and hope we find new pathways. Even then, if we find a path that works for one piece of evidence, there’s no easy way to track how we got there. 

This is a shame as, overall, I enjoyed the experience. Despite English not being the native tongue of the cast, they all put in decent enough performances, and I was wrapped-up in the mystery. There are a lot of scenes to find, but again, no easy way to track the paths to them. When I first reached the end, I accused everyone I had enough evidence for (four out of six people) and none of them were the culprit. This meant that I had no choice but to somewhat blindly play back through and try again – at which point I actually did worse. We can skip scenes to speed the process up, but it’s still an oversight that I hope gets looked at either in a patch or in whatever we get next from Button Interactive.

I do want to shout-out the indie game love, though. Publisher GameDev.Ist get one of their other games in here for PinkiePie to play in Anomaly Agent, but we also get to see the likes of Bannerlord. We help Pinkie play them by clicking on the screen at certain points, although these QTE sequences are very short and don’t add a tremendous amount to the overall story. It’s still cool to see the addition of these titles in there to share the indie game love!

Conclusion

An interesting premise and story that is worth playing makes Hacked: The Streamer a title that FMV players should definitely consider. However, not being easily able to track our choices makes it more of a chore to play through repeatedly, especially when hoping to see different outcomes.

This game was tested and reviewed on PC (via Steam). All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by the publisher.