Save the planet ... by hacking it!
As a programmer, sysadmin, typist, and puzzle enthusiast, I have some vivid expectations for the ideal "hacking" game. Hacknet isn't it; but it's the closest I've seen yet.
Hacknet isn't as realistic as NITE Team 4, hand-waving gameplay concepts like local executables running on remote machines; remote code execution requiring cracks on multiple outward-facing services; or notes that use "megabytes" of memory for each line of text (the memory usage is really a thin metaphor for screen space).
But after the tutorial, the game does a good job of glossing over its shaky technobabble, and quickly dives into reading emails, browsing web boards, and exploring filesystems. And those things felt pretty real. By the game's end I'd mostly forgotten its bizarre architectural idiosyncrasies (well, except for text-note memory).
Unlike many other hacking games, Hacknet doesn't have an upgrade path for your machine, so you can't scale up to running cracks faster or using more of them simultaneously. I was dubious about this at first, but the simplicity really works to Hacknet's benefit: I was never insufficiently equipped for a challenge, and I never got distracted from hacking by watching a currency wallet.
Hacknet's UI isn't perfect, but gets the job done. It stands out that a few controls require clicking, and a few others require typing -- because most controls are both clickable and keyboard-able. Nice! (Having both graphical and text interfaces to all commands is in my "ideal" hacking game vision.)
Hands-down, the worst part of the UI is its node-map of discovered servers, which is impossible to organize and also way too small and crowded. Nodes can partially overlap other nodes, so, that's kinda bad. This would be worse if Hacknet's quests had more backtracking and made you search for long-forgotten connections, but since they usually just throw you at newly-discovered nodes, this UI element is merely an occasional annoyance.
An aspect that Hacknet actually nails, I think, is its balance between nerd culture and drama. Granted, the core story isn't very elaborate; but it's well-paced, following a technological plot without getting lost in the technical details. And it leaves plenty of freely-discoverable files that flesh out the world and its sense of humor, like audio diaries in text form, to be consumed or ignored as one sees fit.
Overall, Hacknet is good enough. The immersiveness is imperfect, the UI is just fine, and the puzzles aren't very ambitious - I was disappointed that the Decypher tool didn't require reverse-engineering its C# algorithm - but everything works moderately well, and it succeeds at stringing together objectives to be compelling, and fun.
Better than: Hacker Evolution, Hackmud, NITE Team 4 (the demo at least), Uplink
Not as good as: my perfect hacking game. ... maybe someday.
The internet-culture humor was amusing: but surely there are more sources than just bash.org? There have to be, right? (Maybe not.)