What are the most effective hacking video games on PC? Recreation builders have lengthy valued the ‘hacker ethic’ – the desire and ability to seize a recreation by the scruff of its code, rip it aside, and put the items collectively in a brand new means. Id Software program prioritized the nascent modding group once they had been creating Doom. Valve courted it from Half-Life onward, and the whole thing of the MOBA style stems from people futzing with Warcraft 3.
After all, most gamers are simply that: gamers. We see numbers and letters in a line of code, not that means. However, there’s a lineage of video games which have sought to ship the fantasy of being in full command of a pc’s capabilities, of utilizing that management to wreak destruction – or to avert it. This checklist consists of a few of the finest PC video games, both completely about hacking or that includes the ability as a heavy part, whether or not a part of the sci-fi world of a mess of area video games, encouraging teamwork in probably the greatest co-op video games, or placing you within the hacker’s seat of an RPG recreation, so there’s one thing for everybody in our checklist of the most effective hacking video games.
Listed here are the most effective hacking video games on PC in 2025:
Cyberpunk 2077
Night time Metropolis is an enormous playground of potential, as we increase upon in our Cyberpunk 2077 evaluation, with loads of locations to discover, jobs to finish in return for eddies, and an entire metropolis’s value of priceless issues to hack.
Loads of shenanigans will be had throughout fight since that is set in a first-person cyberpunk world. You should use Cyberpunk 2077’s fast hacking to ping any linked system or particular person on a community, then add daemons to mess with them. Some could trigger the affected enemy to drop their gun, whereas others could blind them briefly. You’ll be able to inflict a number of daemons concurrently if going through a tricky opponent. You too can forego the entire hacking factor to blast enemies away as a substitute, however you may as nicely check out the most effective FPS video games on PC whilst you’re at it.
Watch Canines Legion
Whereas 2014’s Watch Canines stumbled out the gate with an especially bland, if grumpy protagonist, Watch Canines 2 was a extra energetic and likable effort. Watch Canines Legion turns the dial to eleven, exhibiting a near-future London, and as a substitute of getting only one playable character, why not an entire metropolis?
Basically, it’s not massively totally different from Watch Canines 2 in some ways. Nonetheless, providing you with management of a possible metropolis’s value of rapscallions and scoundrels opens up new infiltration prospects, regardless of the job. Maybe you could nab some intel from a rooftop? Why not use a development employee’s drone to fly up there? Possibly you wish to be an unassuming granny who occurs to be a extremely expert undercover agent. Irrespective of who the Watch Canines Legion finest recruits are, you’ll discover some memorable Londoners so as to add to your roster – or lose should you allow Watch Canines Legion’s permadeath.
Operation Tango
Operation Tango is all about teamwork. One particular person performs a pc genius who remotely accesses all kinds of techniques and networks, whereas the opposite is a area agent making an attempt to navigate hostile conditions on the bottom safely. You’ll be able to’t see what your fellow agent is doing, so communication is paramount to creating it out alive.
By means of its uneven gameplay, Operation Tango completely captures the fun of hacking into techniques remotely and puzzling by way of menus, with the stress and duty of your teammate’s destiny on the road. Protecting a cool head beneath stress will make you are feeling like a hacking professional.
Statement
Statement is the uncommon recreation that casts the participant as the pc. As SAM, a HAL-like area station OS, your purpose is to assist Emma, the lone (?) occupant of the station, after a mysterious occasion leaves it powerless and stranded. SAM can swap between cameras, offering viewpoints across the station. Finally, he beneficial properties mobility, too, taking management of a spherical digital camera and floating across the station in zero gravity.
Like No Code’s earlier recreation, Tales Untold, Statement is intimately involved with the methods the know-how we use mediates the tales we are able to inform. It isn’t a hacking recreation, per se. But it surely does present the most effective approximation of what it might be wish to be contained in the machine. Assuming that the machine completes complicated processes by collaborating in WarioWare-like mini-games, that’s.
Telling Lies
Many of the video games on this checklist try and make gamers really feel the prowess of the skillful hacker. Telling Lies, nonetheless, focuses on the voyeurism. Like Statement, Telling Lies’ protagonist isn’t strictly a hacker. However, as a former FBI agent with entry to a trove of stolen, labeled video clips, she certain seems like one.
After an preliminary minimize scene that exhibits our whistleblower plugging a filched USB into her laptop, it’s your job to enter search phrases that can yield the trove’s secrets and techniques. To say an excessive amount of extra would spoil the enjoyable; for on a regular basis you spend fast-forwarding and looking out phrases, Telling Lies’ core mechanic is a thriller.
Exapunks
Exapunks, the 2018 puzzler from Zachtronics, casts you as a hacker in an alt-past 1997, even when a few of its different historical past parts really feel awfully at residence within the current. The cyberpunk world is ravaged by a plague referred to as the ‘phage’, and our hacker protagonist must shell out $700 a day for life-saving medicine. A mysterious AI guarantees to maintain the doses coming if the protagonist works for her.
You do this by studying to code – courtesy of Trash World Information, a PDF zine that comes with the sport – and inputting instructions to ship little digital robots referred to as EXAs skittering round digital grids. Like Quadrilateral Cowboy, Exapunks desires to show you a brand new ability, not simply feed you the ability fantasy you have already got. The programming language it teaches you is full-featured sufficient to program your video games inside the recreation. Exapunks calls for extra work from you than one thing like Watch Canines Legion however completely rewards your efforts.
Gray Hack
Gray Hack is a web-based MMO recreation during which the world is all the time alive. Any resolution or change you make will proceed after you turn off and will have penalties. In Gray Hack, you may entry a community of procedurally generated computer systems and use Terminal and Textual content Editor in your exploits. The huge world consists of alternatives to assault different gamers, tackle facet missions, and earn cash and status to degree up your hacking expertise.
Hackmud
Hackmud is an MMO that casts the participant as a hacker in a ‘90s-inspired interface. It’s bought ample tutorials, however in the end, to play this recreation nicely, you will have to be taught some Javascript. However, should you do, the world is your oyster.
This crunchy 2016 hacking sim is a hive of scum and villainy that has drawn comparisons to EVE On-line and Jurassic Park. Equal elements a hacker’s paradise and a social deception recreation like Mafia (the occasion recreation, not the open-world motion sequence), Hackmud is the following step for grasp hackers who’ve minimize their enamel on the following recreation on our checklist.
Quadrilateral Cowboy
Like Watch Canines Legion, Quadrilateral Cowboy is a recreation about utilizing hacking to get in, seize the factor, and get out with out anybody realizing you had been ever there. In contrast to Watch Canines Legion, the hacking in Quadrilateral Cowboy is way more like precise hacking.
Billed as ’twentieth Century Cyberpunk,’ Blendo Video games’ trendy first-person puzzler casts the participant as a hacker thief pulling off Ocean’s 11-style heists with the assistance of a conveyable laptop or ‘deck’. You’ll open doorways, flip off lasers, and management a mechanical quadruped — all with strains of code.
Most video games summary hacking to make it as fast and intuitive as attainable. However typing instructions loaded with numbers and odd punctuation will not be an intuitive act, and Quadrilateral Cowboy doesn’t attempt to make it so. As a substitute, with a delicate studying curve and a wise tutorial, Quadrilateral Cowboy teaches you the fundamentals of code and makes you are feeling like a badass for being a great scholar.
Hacknet
In Hacknet, you’re a hacker with entry to versatile code and a database full of Easter eggs. After a useless hacker contacts you by way of automated message in a ghostly inciting incident, you set off on a variety of hack-centric missions.
Hacknet simulates real-world hacking as you play, educating you UNIX instructions much like these you’ll use to, say, empty somebody’s checking account IRL. A 2017 enlargement, Labyrinths, added intriguing ARG parts and new instruments to play with.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
The Deus Ex video games are the anti-Star Trek — each odd-numbered one is sweet. The unique Deus Ex was acclaimed as a masterpiece, however its follow-up, Invisible Conflict, was retrospectively thought to be a significant misstep. Human Revolution, the sequence’ long-awaited third entry, was hailed as a return to kind.
As in System Shock 2, hacking is one ability that protagonist Adam Jensen can dump factors into, permitting him to bypass fights and rummage round the place he shouldn’t. The interface is equally participating, with gamers capturing nodes on a grid to construct a path between two factors. The system returned, principally unchanged, within the 2016 sequel Mankind Divided.
Uplink
Launched initially lower than a month after 9/11, Uplink is a throwback to an easier time, emulating the aesthetic of ‘90s hacker movies in its presentation of code-cracking. In contrast to in System Shock 2, hacking will not be one possibility amongst many right here; it’s the entire recreation, and in consequence, your display screen is a precise illustration of the display screen your participant interacts with (a presentation that many different entries on this checklist have borrowed).
After receiving a message from a deceased hacker (a surprisingly widespread theme on this checklist), the participant can goal a legal group utilizing a virus to destroy the Web. Fascinatingly, you may select to choose out of the primary story completely, focusing as a substitute on finishing freelance hacking gigs.
System Shock 2
The hacking minigame in System Shock 2 is nothing particular. Principally, you play a simplified recreation of Minesweeper, the place you have to hyperlink three mines in a row to hack efficiently. It’s fairly fundamental. Nonetheless, System Shock 2 is notable for implementing hacking as one among a number of ability timber that the participant might pursue. Whereas the participant was solid as a hacker within the unique System Shock, that they had the toolset to role-play a hacker in its sequel.
Many sci-fi RPGS launched after System Shock 2 have adopted in its footsteps – particularly these with an immersive hacking simulator bent – providing hacking talents as one route to perform a purpose. None current hacking realistically; you’re not getting into strains of code (and NieR: Automata abstracted the method to the purpose that it turned a twin-stick shooter). However should you get pleasure from avoiding fights and rigging turrets to take away enemies, you’ve System Shock 2 to thank.
The System Shock 2 remake retains a lot of the hacking mentality of the unique, though the method has grow to be way more streamlined, making it extra of an automatic process than earlier than. It’s nonetheless good, although, as our System Shock 2 evaluation can attest.
Nameless Hacker Simulator
You may assume the lifetime of a hacker is tremendous luxurious, nothing however penthouses and the best folks you might lay eyes on. Sadly, this isn’t the case, in actual fact, it’s so much lonelier than it appears, judging by Nameless Hacker Simulator. Secure inside the confines of your personal condominium, you’re free to browse the web, trying to find public figures to troll. It’s not as pathetic because it sounds, you’re studying learn how to hack for the primary time, utilizing semi-realistic instruments primarily based on the packages actual hackers use.
While you’re up and working with the newest hacking software program, it doesn’t take lengthy earlier than you’re in the midst of uncovering a secret group’s darkish intentions. The choices you make in your journey will have an effect on the end result of the story, so should you select to carry out unhealthy deeds, simply know your actions could come again to chunk you.
Now, you shouldn’t have any bother discovering someplace to stretch these mind and finger muscular tissues with so many hacking video games to hone your expertise. For extra brain-benders, we’ve bought a greater diversity of puzzle video games, or maybe you’d like a few of our favourite detective video games. If you end up after one thing extra sedate and fewer demanding as a substitute, strive probably the greatest life video games or one among our favourite stress-free video games to take your thoughts off the stress of hacking techniques.
