Hack ‘n’ Slash

Alice, a young elf, has the power to wield a super cool USB sword. With it, she can "hack" her surroundings by directly tapping into their source code. Alice and her pixie pal Bob must use their hacking powers (and their senses of humor) to take down an evil wizard.

As the player, you can do all kinds of things with Alice's USB sword. When you swing it at a bush, you can adjust the ON FIRE field to read TRUE, and then instruct the (now burning) bush to drop 400 hearts. If a bird is attacking you, just change its faction to GOOD, or instruct it to stop attacking. When a castle guard attacks, you can hack him so his attacks heal you instead of cause damage. Or you can go into a guard’s programmed movements and have him turn in circles forever. If there are multiple bad guys, you can make some GOOD and some BAD, and sit back and watch while they fight with each other.

While Hack 'n' Slash starts out pretty easy, it gets difficult very quickly. You may want to work on some of these problems as a family.

• Did any parts of this game give you a lot of trouble?
• Do you think that you can use what you've learned about coding in other areas of your life?