SornHack: Reverse Engineering

SornHack is a first-person reverse-engineering puzzle game where the world itself is the system you can modify. Enter a controlled cyber laboratory, inspect how systems behave, form a hypothesis, then use your tools to change the rules. Use SornScan to search and manipulate simulated memory values, discover addresses and pointers, and trace what changes them. Use SornTrace to inspect program behavior, follow execution flow, and experiment with instructions such as CMP, NOP, CALL, and RET. There is rarely only one way forward. Observe the system, experiment with different approaches, and discover what happens when you change something the world expects to remain constant. SornHack is built around real programming and reverse-engineering concepts, presented inside a fictional and intentionally hackable sandbox. No prior reverse-engineering experience is required.

You wake up as a test subject inside the Reverse-Engineering Facility, a sealed research complex where every room is a simulation and every rule is software. A calm facility voice welcomes you to Lab 01 and gives you only one hint: everything here is software, you just have not learned how to look at it yet. At the terminal you receive two tools, SornScan, a memory scanner, and SornTrace, a debugger. Attached to the facility's process, labsim.exe, they let you see the numbers and instructions behind the world: a training robot's health, the charge of an unstable bridge, the chamber's gravity, your keycard's access level, the perception of security robots, and the damage code of a live combat simulation. Across seven labs the facility tests whether you will play by its rules or rewrite them. Freeze a value, follow a pointer, patch an instruction with a NOP, flip a conditional branch, reclassify a hostile unit as friendly. Each lab adds a new layer of the system, and each obstacle can be solved in more than one way. Chapter 1 ends in Lab 07, Combat Systems, where you learn the facility's final lesson: every rule here was data, and you can rewrite it.