Aesthetically, mentally, and musically rich. Exapunks delivers on challenging, creative, and narratively interesting hacker puzzles (even if some of them take a bit to long to write and test for). These puzzles are held up by a foundation of amazing world and environment choices. Tutorializing through hand-delivered zines is what puts the 'punk' in Exapunks, beyond being fun souvenirs. You genuinely have to rely on anarchist, independent publishing for photoscans of documentation. Turning that grass-roots knowledge into independent action, both for real personal and community benefit and just to screw with people because you can, empowers the player to hack by and for themselves. Having access to a chatroom of room-temperature IQ nerds for exposition is another great touch. It makes the world, already supported by NPC interaction, puzzles, and the zines, feel that bit more real.

I feel like the art and voices are drawn and performed very cleanly, a bit too cleanly, for this kind of game. I'm fine with saying that the art is overly clean/safe to give a visual comparison to the player's world of exas and the actual material world they live in, but not the voice work. It's done well by the actors, but it's presented in a very sanitized way. It's like every character is a GPS voice. Real people don't sound that 'mastered' in real life, you know?