Ah, a job sim for people who like configuring their router

Do you know how the internet works? I don't. But it might have something to do with the nine billion ethernet cables coming out of my basement like a colony of suspicious worms. This is Tower Networking Inc, a hacky wire-crossing simulator where you run an entire internet service provider out of a damp cellar in an endlessly growing high-rise. 

It's also a roguelike for some god-forsaken reason, but you can turn that off in the options and just play it as a straight-up cyberpunk job sim about making sure people can read all the awful news through their smoking modems.

It hit early access in summer last year but only recently popped up in my Steam recommendations, like a 1st line support blister waiting to be popped. You can get an idea of how deeply IT-brained the game is by watching the trailer, which expertly fuses the synthetic beats of hacker-happy music with green-tinted command lines and the kind of router configuration jargon that makes normal people break out in a fearful sweat.

 "Administrate the network," it announces with all the glee of a corporate training video you are mandated to watch to secure your bonus. "Troubleshoot connectivity," it says with the encouraging tone of a bullet point from a job description on Indeed dot com. This is a sim for a very particular type of lunatic. I have played it for 10 hours. I fear I know less about computers now than when I first arrived. I'm having a good time.

Mostly that is down to the clicky-clacky satisfaction of getting any of this damn technology working at all. The tutorial heroically tries to teach you the finer points of configuring what is essentially a videogame version of a Cisco router or Palo Alto switch. These are things a normal home internet user will never see except in stock footage of a data centre in a documentary about cyber warfare called ZERO DAY or ATTACK VECTOR or ESCALATED PRIVILEGES. Here, you have to type commands into these devices via a "debugger" machine, a little blockoid of metal you wire up to whatever network you're configuring. Like all good hacking sims, there is a whole language to learn and syntax to obey.

The goal is to get data to flow from one place to another. A news corporation on the second floor of the tower wants to gather readers. And three apartment dwellers on the floor below want to read those stories. So off you go into your laptop's store menu to buy a handful of cables and some hubs. They are delivered by invisible forces via a lift. You take this same all-knowing elevator up and down, plugging all the equipment into the right ports, then watching the blinky wee lights flash. Ha, this is easy.

Oh wait. You still need to set up a DNS server. And think about DHCP. What about the firewalls? If you've installed multiple routers in your network, you'll have to make sure they funnel the data in the right direction. This game fully simulates packet capture. It has RIP and APIs and STP to combat broadcast storms, a type of cyberweather that sounds way cooler than it is. If every acronym I have just written is hitting your forehead with a wet and worthless slap, like a sorrowful fish with the face of Mark Zuckerberg, I do not blame you. I have been unable to reach the fifth floor of this infinite tower because I don't know how to get the fiber optic links working and all my servers keep going on fire.

But I am enjoying the flames. I quickly abandoned any attempt at the default roguelike mode, which puts you on a timer and threatens game over as soon as providers and customers get too annoyed at their messenger apps breaking. Instead, I prefer the slow-paced tinkering that comes from customising the difficulty options to death - loads of money, no deadlines, and a greatly reduced chance of cyberattacks. It is like having a home lab, without the enormous electricity bill. Here, amid the wires and little tin boxes, you can just play.

I like toying with this stuff because it reminds me that this is what the internet was, and arguably what it still is. Underneath the washboard abs of Instagram's frontend, there is still a wriggling intestine made of Cat5 cable, somewhere. In the popular imagination it may be clean and clinical data centres all the way down, but the net is still contingent on the day-to-day work of confused technicians taking out a plug and putting it back in the wrong hole.

Infrastructure is continually rotting and machinery's default objective is to be on fire. We made rocks that think, and now we have to get those rocks to talk to each other, or everybody dies. That's what Tower Networking Inc is all about, getting your curious human hands stuck into the guts of the machine. And, if you like, getting summarily sacked when all the SLAs come a cropper.