The base game explores euthanasia as a major mission, the moral system of the hacker community as an aside, corporations being allowed to have monopolies, and the danger of allowing any Tom, Dick and Harry to have access to scripts and programs that make hacking a cakewalk. I really rather appreciate the storylines of the game, as well as the themes that the game explores. In fact, I'd go so far as to say Uplink was more of an RPG than a puzzle game, whereas Hacknet is the polar opposite. It also dispenses with the notion of having to "bounce" connections from one computer to another, instead creating a timer for each hacking attempt that counts down from 100 (presumably percent) to show how much of the trace is left to be completed.
Other improvements include use of a terminal and the need to type in actual Unix commands ( ls, cd, and kill mainly - OK, so they're Unix 101, but they do a little to add to the realism), plus a soundtrack that evolves throughout the game and a customisable UI (well. In fact, Hacknet is much more akin to the quintessential puzzle game than Uplink ever was as there is a much greater emphasis placed on investigation rather than (necessarily) hack'n'crack. Hacknet seems to have fixed the latter almost entirely, with the former being very much improved on. It was very much a Hollywood-hacking experience with the drawbacks that hacking tasks were incredibly repetitive and the storyline was rather slow and short. As a refresher, Uplink was a ground-breaking game that was released in 1999 - in fact, when CD-ROMs were still a thing. Let's be real, there's going to be comparisons to Uplink. A DLC expansion pack called Labyrinths was released in 2017, expanding the game by another handful of hours. Or possibly finds themselves taking on big projects for other factions. The player takes on hacking jobs using the HackNet OS provided to them, and (possibly) eventually untangles the web that Bit has found himself in. The player assumes the role of a computer hacker who has received cryptic messages from a hacker called Bit, claiming that he's "already dead". A spiritual successor to Uplink: Hacker Elite in quite a lot of respects, Hacknet was developed by Team Fractal Alligator 1 and published by Surprise Attack Games in 2015. Hacknet is a puzzle/ hacking simulation video game. My name is Bit, and if you're reading this, I'm already dead. I guess I'm supposed to write this in past tense, though I hardly feel like admitting it's over.
Not quite as bad as my previous writeups, but there's still spoilers.