I remember when I first heard about Mr. Robot. I was handed a flyer at University which had some guy in a hoodie on it and some average tagline to get you interested. I threw it away roughly 5 seconds later. Then posters started popping up around campus, flyers were at almost any information desk & cafeteria, my Amazon Prime was being bombarded with marketing for it, and to top it all off it was being shoved in my face on my Facebook feed.
Eventually I decided to give it a watch. The first season had already finished, and I had a week filled with absolutely nothing to do. So I kicked back and stuck the pilot episode on just to see what the fuss was about. Now I'm over halfway through the second season, I can happily say that Mr. Robot is probably the best TV show I have ever watched and has remained consistently good each and every episode since the pilot. The TV show follows a twenty something named Elliot who suffers from anxiety, depression, and struggles to interact socially with other people. To top it all off he is also addicted to morphine. By day he is an employee for a digital security firm, by night he is part of a hacker group that is on the verge of changing the world.
So when I saw Telltale Games tease Mr. Robot posts on Facebook I knew something was up, just a few days later 1.51:Exfiltrati0n was available on Google Play & the App Store. Styled like a messaging app, created to match the style of E Corp, the antagonistic corporation of the series. The story behind the game is that you have found an abandoned phone, picked it up and decided to keep it as your own. Little do you know however that this phone belongs to the head of Elliot's hacker group, Darlene. Darlene contacts you and simply asks for a file that is on the phone, then she'll leave you alone forever and totally not ruin your life. However, you cannot access the file due to a system reboot that occurs, and so you must do her bidding until you are able to download a scan software that will allow you to access said file and send it to her.
Eventually I decided to give it a watch. The first season had already finished, and I had a week filled with absolutely nothing to do. So I kicked back and stuck the pilot episode on just to see what the fuss was about. Now I'm over halfway through the second season, I can happily say that Mr. Robot is probably the best TV show I have ever watched and has remained consistently good each and every episode since the pilot. The TV show follows a twenty something named Elliot who suffers from anxiety, depression, and struggles to interact socially with other people. To top it all off he is also addicted to morphine. By day he is an employee for a digital security firm, by night he is part of a hacker group that is on the verge of changing the world.
So when I saw Telltale Games tease Mr. Robot posts on Facebook I knew something was up, just a few days later 1.51:Exfiltrati0n was available on Google Play & the App Store. Styled like a messaging app, created to match the style of E Corp, the antagonistic corporation of the series. The story behind the game is that you have found an abandoned phone, picked it up and decided to keep it as your own. Little do you know however that this phone belongs to the head of Elliot's hacker group, Darlene. Darlene contacts you and simply asks for a file that is on the phone, then she'll leave you alone forever and totally not ruin your life. However, you cannot access the file due to a system reboot that occurs, and so you must do her bidding until you are able to download a scan software that will allow you to access said file and send it to her.
I have to say, at first I was unsure how it was going to work but after finishing it I'm happy to say it works a lot better than I expected it to. The game plays out in real time over the course of a week, you send and receive text messages from various established and new characters from the world of Mr. Robot, as well as manipulate employees from various corporations to unwittingly help fsociety's cause.
A lot of people wont be too keen on how the game plays though. It's 100% text based, as a messaging service would be, plus it takes almost a week to actually be able to finish the game as you do need to wait to be messaged by Darlene and other characters to know what you need to do next. It's not a game that you can sit down and play for a period of time, but it's something you can play whilst you just use your phone on a daily basis; picking up small chunks of story every few hours. It's not particularly long in the grand scheme of things, but because it takes place in real time it takes a long time to actually get through.
Though it's a text based adventure where you pick a response from a pre-determined list, it's actually pretty difficult to be able to get through some sections of the game. I'm unsure whether you can actually fail the game, but at one particular point I was having to communicate with an idiotic employee who was being told by someone on the security team not to do what I was telling them to do because I was also having a conversation with them that made them question who I was and what I was getting their employees to do. Had I chosen just another wrong dialogue option I may well have failed. The majority of the time you're not even given any real clues on what to say to people, or who to message. It's just a matter of trusting your gut instincts and answering some pretty interesting logic puzzles by digging around on people's social media profiles.
It does end rather abruptly though, and as such it feels like there is a lot more left to come. Whilst the situation appears to be resolved, I doubt this is the last we will see of this type of Mr. Robot game, due to the complex nature of the show.
A lot of people wont be too keen on how the game plays though. It's 100% text based, as a messaging service would be, plus it takes almost a week to actually be able to finish the game as you do need to wait to be messaged by Darlene and other characters to know what you need to do next. It's not a game that you can sit down and play for a period of time, but it's something you can play whilst you just use your phone on a daily basis; picking up small chunks of story every few hours. It's not particularly long in the grand scheme of things, but because it takes place in real time it takes a long time to actually get through.
Though it's a text based adventure where you pick a response from a pre-determined list, it's actually pretty difficult to be able to get through some sections of the game. I'm unsure whether you can actually fail the game, but at one particular point I was having to communicate with an idiotic employee who was being told by someone on the security team not to do what I was telling them to do because I was also having a conversation with them that made them question who I was and what I was getting their employees to do. Had I chosen just another wrong dialogue option I may well have failed. The majority of the time you're not even given any real clues on what to say to people, or who to message. It's just a matter of trusting your gut instincts and answering some pretty interesting logic puzzles by digging around on people's social media profiles.
It does end rather abruptly though, and as such it feels like there is a lot more left to come. Whilst the situation appears to be resolved, I doubt this is the last we will see of this type of Mr. Robot game, due to the complex nature of the show.
STORY: 7/10
GAMEPLAY: 7/10
PRESENTATION: 8/10
LIFESPAN: 5/10
SCORE: 7/10
It's a great companion to the show that fans will undoubtedly love, but I doubt it will have the same appeal to newcomers as you're kept very in the dark about what's actually going on, even until the end, because it assumes you have already seen the show and know what's going to happen.