Bitburner is an idle game about hacking that teaches real JavaScript

An image of a hacking terminal from the game Bitburner. — (Image credit: Fulcrum Games and Hydroflame)

Want your time spent noodling around with idle games to actually bear fruit? Bitburner is an incremental-style idler that casts you as a terminal cowboy on the world wide web, hacking, stealing, and scripting your way to the top of the world.

Challenging you to learn how its systems work and automate them yourself, Bitburner takes the novel tack of letting you use JavaScript within the game itself. A very basic programming background certainly helps you get started, but you don't need it to play. As you go, the game presents programming puzzles and questions to help you learn new skills, earn rewards, and get more powerful.

As you explore the dystopian world of the future you meet new people and find new networks to infiltrate and compromise—or factions to ally with. You can also pick up new cyberpunk augmentations, boosting your body and your network to ever-higher levels, as well as develop your character's stats. There are also neat minigames, like stock trading, to uncover and master.

As you start to get deeper into the game, there's a nice big GitHub repository of markdown to help you out. Once you've done well and beaten it once, there is, of course, a way to get incrementing bonuses for future runs. The community is quite welcoming, too, if you get stuck.

You can find Bitburner on Steam and as a web app on github.io.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.