Portugues
Enmeshed
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About the game
Enmeshed does not open on a menu. It opens on a terminal. A login scrolls by, you are "mark", and a mail arrives from someone who would like a certain company's new network to fail. The mail is encrypted, so the text decodes itself line by line while you wait, and then the attached files give you a list of targets, from small practice meshes to the final one.
Each target is a graph of connected nodes, drawn on the screen in the terminal window. Your goal is to bring the network health down to zero. You do that with a small kit of tools: crash a node, cut a link, slow a connection, corrupt data or reroute traffic. Every tool can be used only a few times, and the nodes that survive keep passing traffic to each other, so the order of your moves matters a lot more than the number of them.
The first targets are tutorials that teach one tool at a time. Later ones mix the tools, hide data behind a firewalled node that you have to intercept from a neighbour, and ask for more than just an outage. Mark Barr made the whole thing for js13kGames 2018, where it had to fit in 13 KB, and it is a handsome little piece of code: the terminal, the logo, the animated decryption and the network view are all drawn by the page itself.
Playing it here
Click Play and give the page about ten seconds: the boot sequence and the login are part of the show. When the menu shows, type 1 and press Enter for the Story, or 2 for Challenge. In the Story, press Enter each time the game asks you to, to read the mail, open the attachment and connect to the first mesh. Then pick a tool on the left bar and click the nodes or links you want to hit. The "Network Health" figure at the top right tells you how you are doing. The game keeps the stage you reached and your coins in the browser, so a later visit can pick up from there.
The game was made for a large screen and a mouse, so it works best on a computer and the page may need to scroll on a small window.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| letters, numbers | type commands and menu choices in the terminal |
| Enter | confirm; advance the story |
| Backspace | erase the last character you typed |
| click | use the selected tool on a node or a link |
| click on a tool in the left bar | choose it (the number shows how many uses are left) |
| arrow keys / mouse wheel | move and zoom the network view |
| Ctrl + 0 | reset the view |
A few things worth knowing
Read the objective line. The line at the bottom of the network view says what the target wants: sometimes only to go offline, sometimes to steal data first.
Look at the whole graph before you click. A node with many links is the busiest one, and taking it out early changes how every other node behaves.
Practice meshes are free. Do the practice targets in order. Each one adds a tool, and the later meshes expect you to combine them.
Credits and licence
Enmeshed was created by Mark Barr for js13kGames 2018 and is released under the MIT licence. The story is fiction, set in a made-up operating system with made-up companies, and the laptop around the terminal is a parody drawn in CSS. The licence text is linked from this page, and the source is on GitHub.