Video Game / Beglitched

Beglitched is a puzzle game by Hexecutable, incorporating elements from Minesweeper and Bejeweled, with a little bit of Battleship thrown in for flavor.

You come across a laptop owned by the Glitch Witch, a notorious hacker. Everything on it is locked except for a note asking you to to take her place. To discover her secrets you must do as she asks, meeting her online friends and enemies along the way.

While exploring a network, each network node will display clues about the surrounding nodes' contents. If a node contains an item, for example, each adjacent node will display a coin icon. In battle, you must locate and glitch out the enemy avatar using the various tiles on the battle grid, matching like tiles for useful effects such as prolonging your turn or upgrading sectors.

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Tropes present in Beglitched include:

• Antepiece: The first enemy isn't hidden, although he is unaware that's the case, and also clumsily states when there's a bomb underneath him.
• Apologetic Attacker: Some of the cats in Catnet will upgrade your bomb sectors for you. Unfortunately, you still have to fight them, since they don't know how to log off on their own.
• Bag of Spilling: Usable items are removed when leaving a network, and your money is reset to $100. Only persistent items (with a border marking) may be moved between inventory and storage and aren't deleted from networks. The final network requires getting around this bag.
• Bandit Mook: Once the rat is active, he'll randomly steal half your money whenever you enter a network zone, and will keep doing so until you can stop him.
• Background Music Override: When there's a few battle themes, The final network's background music persists when a battle starts, similar to what's done in Chrono Trigger.
• Caps Lock:
  • Notes left by the Glitch Witch are all in uppercase letters.
  • Enemy attack messages are shown in large font to imply capital letters, but the lower-tier opponents still use lower-case. Stronger enemies are large font and capitalized.
• Cash Gate: Ratnet requires having enough money to proceed, with the player needing to wager funds to build up enough money. Eggnet also requires enough money but provides no means to raise funds the first time you reach it. In both cases, your cash resets each time you enter a network and the player needs to raise funds within said network.
• Cast From HP: The permanent item from Owlnet allows you to place a bomb anywhere on the battlefield at the cost of 1 HP. This is later required for Apenet.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Legend program is superfluous for most of the game, but works when the symbols get scrambled or to push error messages out of the way.
• Dummied Out: In-Universe, you can find an old version tutorial network created by the Glitch Witch, along with notes lamenting its wordiness.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The player character's real name is never given. Most simply call them by their assumed identity, Glitch Witch. The Glitch Witch herself says "stranger," Chewy uses "Fish Sticker," and chat logs simply say "me."
• Gimmick Level: Nearly every level is one. Depending on the network, you might find yourself transporting delicate cat photos, avoiding alarms, or wagering your money.
• Interface Screw: The last two networks force unclosable message boxes onto your screen, obscuring the overworld map and battle grid. In case of the battle grid, the message boxes also block explosions (and the opponent hides behind it.)
• Luck-Based Mission: The theme of Ratnet. The very first obstacle is a Monty Hall Problem, and it is entirely possible to just fail three times in a row and immediately get kicked out of the network.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • The "Legend" program at first seems to be a waste of a program slot. That is, until the map icons get shuffled around and you need it to tell what's what.
  • Spam is explicitly useless, but in Ratnet, one of the bets is that you have at least one instance of it at the end of a battle. The next area has a shop that sells Spam, Spam, Spam, and Spam, but said spam is useful for a different reason.
• Match-Three Game: In battle, the player can freely swap adjacent tiles each cycle. When three identical sectors are in a straight line, they will vanish and can have special effects when matched:
  • Computers give extra cycles, delaying enemy attacks.
  • Compasses combine to form a more accurate compass. Matching the more accurate compass gives cycles.
  • Money tiles give you some cash.
  • Battery tiles replenish your energy, needed to activate most sectors.
  • Bombs combine to form a bigger bomb that hits adjacent tiles as well.
    • If you combine three of those, you'll get one that hits the corners too. Try it again and you'll just take damage.
• No Hero Discount: The shopkeeper in the forum doesn't provide a discount despite items being helpful in stopping a DDOS.
• NPC Roadblock: In the forum, there's two bouncers that will not let you pass, and drag you back. In two secure networks, there are Cash Gates that sit on an exit node, replacing "Login" with "Talk", one even commenting about it being such a bad user interface for that to happen.
• Plot Coupon: At one point, you need to find four private keys and place them in a hidden area to progress.
• Power-Up Letdown: The helpful hackers upgrade your bombs to increase the number of tiles they cover. It's in a mission where you have to carry cargo, and need to keep those larger bombs away from them.
• Robotic Reveal: The cats are actually A.I.s created by the Glitch Witch. And you might be one of them.
• The Lost Woods: Referenced by a directory on the laptop named "The Woods", a maze of sub-directories marked with compass directions.
• Tilesweeper: The overworld functions like this. Walking on a node will reveal the contents of the adjacent nodes, but you have to login to a node to actually access its contents.
• Training Dummy: Some enemies make no effort to fight back (or at least significantly reduced effort), claiming to want to practice something. These generally appear in relation to a gate requiring a setup on the battle grid, or to prepare against a dangerous opponent.
• Unreadably Fast Text: "Loading" appears for only a few frames when disconnecting from the network. A less than desirable disconnection instead has this say "Oh Well". Both messages are barely readable when the player sees it appear.
• Unwanted Assistance: The second tutorial is rather annoying, and lampshaded by giving it the icon of a paperclip.

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FOLLOWING PACKET CRUMBS...
SAVING BACKUPS...
DELETING UNAUTHORIZED ITEMS...
WRITING PROGRESS TO DISK...
WASTING TIME...
RETURNING TO DESKTOP...