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.

An image of a hacking terminal from the game Bitburner.

(Image credit: Fulcrum Games and Hydroflame)

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.

Contributor

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.

Read more
A screenshot of Stimulation Clicker. There are bouncing DVD logos and buttons to click and clips from multiple YouTube videos playing.
Stimulation Clicker distills a decade of internet brainrot into exposure therapy that makes you stupid—plus, it's free!
A set of colored blocks representing an operating system under construction.
Zach-like automation puzzle game ABI-DOS is available on Steam for free
Browser games — Townscaper's lovely towers.
The best browser games
Cozy Desktop Konbini screenshots
My favourite Steam Next Fest game, Cozy Desktop Konbini, combines my love for shopping management sims and desktop idlers
Heart of the Machine
Heart of the Machine is Crusader Kings for speculative sci-fi nerds, flipping the script on the cult AI War series
A hand holding a compass in the woods
Players are already finding creative solutions to Prologue: Go Wayback's grueling difficulty: 'You could just chug gasoline'
Latest in RPG
A ghoul player character standing next to another ghoul
'You are hereby conscripted': Fallout 76 players demand newly-transformed ghoul players help them mine radioactive ore
A hunter in Monster Hunter Wilds shows off their snazzy new earring while striking a pose.
Monster Hunter Wilds' next set of event quests let you snag a snazzy earring, plus armor and weapon decorations
Astarion, after being asked whether he'd like a kiss, winces in the opposite of anticipation in Baldur's Gate 3.
Hasbro will be ready to share news about the future of Baldur's Gate 'in pretty short order'
Baldur's Gate 3 villain Raphael, staring intently at the viewer.
"Eager to get me on my knees, Raphael?" Baldur's Gate 3 mod lets you romance the silk-tongued cambion devil, although maybe you shouldn't, yeah?
A cat gets an affectionate head-scratch in miHoYo's Zenless Zone Zero.
Zenless Zone Zero developer finally embraces its divine domain as the god of jiggle physics, goes mad, adds them to cat balls
Atelier Yumia screenshot
Help, I can't move forward in this chill crafting RPG because I'm too wrapped up in building bases and making sick tools
Latest in News
A ghoul player character standing next to another ghoul
'You are hereby conscripted': Fallout 76 players demand newly-transformed ghoul players help them mine radioactive ore
A hunter in Monster Hunter Wilds shows off their snazzy new earring while striking a pose.
Monster Hunter Wilds' next set of event quests let you snag a snazzy earring, plus armor and weapon decorations
Razer Project Ava key visual
Razer is collaborating on a gaming CAPTCHA to combat AI-powered bots, and of course the first game to use it is the worst Web3 nonsense I've ever seen
Nvidia Vera CPU
Nvidia reveals Vera, a new CPU with 'custom' cores which could be very exciting for its upcoming premium PC processor
HP Omen 45L gaming desktop
This Redditor rocked up to Best Buy and bought an RTX 4060 gaming PC for cheaper than its extended warranty, saving $1,195 and their friend from buying a console
The Marvel Rivals character Magik with her gold-colored sword extended toward the screen, her tights ripped
Marvel Rivals' devs like throwing in curveballs 'to make the roster more interesting,' meaning we'll probably get more characters like Squirrel Girl and Jeff the Land Shark