In the most recent Finji newsletter, lead dev Michael Brough addressed some questions you might have before the game comes out later this month!
Here's what he wrote:
Hey Finji readers! Some of you may be wondering about this SEQUEL that we're making. You might have questions like: Why am I making a sequel?
Should you play the original game first? What is a sequel anyway? Why is it that events are patterned in time to form a past and a future?
I can clear these up for you! Of course a large part of my motivation to make a sequel to 868-HACK came from realising that some parts of the game rules were worth exploring more. I could remix the basic ruleset by adding new abilities and so forth. But there was also a fascination with the very concept of a "sequel". Aside from some tiny jam games, I'd not made a sequel - while many studios make nothing else! I was curious what it would be like to work in that mode.
As I got deeper into development, I kept running into questions that the original game couldn't answer. Who are these character classes - Hacker, Cyborg, etc. - are they different people, or the same person at different times? Who does the computer you're hacking even belong to? What's your motivation? The original game didn't answer these questions because it didn't need to. It wasn't trying to tell a whole story. It just used fragmentary texts to evoke an atmosphere. But now I was digging into these as though they were clues to something more, trying to fill in the space between the games in a way that made sense.
The mere fact of BACK being set after HACK is a story: sequentiality implies narrative. The eternal present has fractured into two distinct moments. Something has changed over time. Every design choice starts to carry the weight of history: if something is the same between both games that says something, and if it's changed that says something else. The constants and variables of the game's world mean something. The more I built the sequel, the steeper this temporal gradient became, demanding more and more answers from the original that I'd never equipped it to give.
So 868-BACK is a sequel, but not just to 868-HACK. It's a sequel to a fictional game: the game that 868-HACK might plausibly have been if these questions all had answers. And as a sequel, of course BACK doesn't directly give these answers either - to play it straight I have to (pretend to) assume the audience has been following the series, is somewhat familiar with the lore of the 868-verse, and only needs to be caught up on what's immediately relevant. It's an odd way of telling a story: projected into the imaginary space between a real game and a semi-fake one. I hope you find it intriguing!