Montreal based development team and professional storytellers, Alice & Smith, has launched a new Kickstarter campaign for their tactical, strategy-based hacking simulation game, Nite Team 4.

Now before I tell more about the game, I should point out that Alice & Smith has already funded previous similar projects and delivered, with their most recent and most successful project being The Black Watchmen ARG (Alternate Reality Game) and comic book.

In simple terms The Black Watchmen are a fictional tactical group similar to the Men In Black and X-Files unit that deals with inexplicable events, the Supernatural, or odd cases and murders that normal military and police units don’t want to deal with or can’t deal with. When one of these events pops up, The Black Watchmen are called in.

In the Black Watchmen ARG, it sounds like the player takes on the role of one of these agents and would carry out specific tasks that was assigned to player or their group from a mysterious secret client to solve the strange cases; at least, that is the gist of it from what I could piece together. This trailer for the Black Watchmen will give you an idea about what the ARG was all about.

The Black Watchmen game is currently on Steam with a Very Positive user rating. This now brings us to Nite Team 4, which is somewhat of a spin-off series. After the success of The Black Watchmen, the development team used the information they gained from researching the government and leaked NSA files to put together a game all about the secret government world, espionage and hacking, with you the player taking on the role of an elite hacker with state of the art tools to complete a variety of different tasks. You will pretty much be Chloe from 24, Felicity from Arrow, or a bit like super-hacker himself, Mr. Robot. Yeah, maybe not the best examples, but you get the idea. You will pretty much play a role similar to the super-hackers you see on TV and in the movies.

The difference is that Nite Team 4 will use real world hacking terminology and references taken straight from leaked NSA documents, and has put together a hacking interface that is supposed to simulate real world programs and networks. Your job will be to find and hack into hostile enemy networks, gain information, share it with your allies, then outfit an elite team to execute a plan to eliminate any threats you find to carry out the leg work that you can’t deal with from your computer. Nite Team 4 places you directly in the center of Cyberwarfare and what it is like to deal with catastrophic cyber attacks.

Due to Alice & Smith’s history of storytelling and ARGs, they promise to deliver a detailed and rich story that will immerse you into the world of Nite Team 4. So far, there isn’t much gameplay shown for what Nite Team 4 is actually like, but they have released this Kickstarter trailer that teases a bit of gameplay and shows a bit of what the game will be like in the video I linked below.

In just 24 hours, Nite Team 4 reached the 50% mark for their Kickstarter funding goal which gave them a huge boost when starting out, and they still have close to about 25 days to go before their Kickstarter campaign ends.

The developers have created a bit of a “Choose your own adventure” style funding campaign where their backers can choose which campaign mission they want to start off with, and gives backers three scenarios to choose from.

The first mission you can choose from is Critical Failure, where you must find the source of a hack that takes the Operation’s control segment for their global position system offline for one hour.
The next mission is set where North Korea is attempting a cyber attack on South Korea’s critical infrastructure, and it is your job to prevent the attack and sabotage the program before it can cause any damage.

The last mission is a bit more science fiction. An advanced military AI that is designed to defend against hackers and launch its own attacks against hackers has a critical error that makes the program more aggressive, and pretty much turns into baby Skynet and begins attacking Critical infrastructures, your job is to shut it down to regain control.

It sounds like Nite Team 4 is pretty much complete at this point because the official Nite Team 4 Website has a quarter 4 2016 release date that will launch for both PC and Mac.

(UPDATE EDIT: The website information seems to be outdated. I just found a Steam Greenlight page that has a release date for the first quarter of 2017.)

There is currently an Alpha demo that you can download from the above Nite Team 4 website if you would like to test it out. I played a little bit of the Alpha and I actually really enjoyed it. It takes a bit of time getting the hang of the commands, but once you do it is a lot of fun to play, I recommend you give it a try and see if you like it.

If you would like to learn more about Alice & Smith you can visit their official website for more details.