Overly realistic 1983, but a game, not a simulator.
Three-hundred-baud text that crawls onto the screen, a handshake you can hear, long-distance charges that land on the phone bill. Bulletin boards, banks, telcos, and far-off machines reached over a fictional X.25 network. The slowness isn't a loading screen; it's the tension.
Your main tool is Objective BASIC: line-numbered classic BASIC with dot-style calls on in-world objects like MODEM and TAPE. Keyloggers, sniffers, coin-miners. 'Malware' is just code you wrote, and every program's source is yours to read, break, and improve.
Sit in the bedroom and let passive income tick over while you read the boards, or take rush jobs with deadlines measured in hours and push your luck. Drifting through the winter is playing it right. So is sweating a deadline at three in the morning.
Four pressures leaning on each other: information, money, BatDime (a homebrew cryptocurrency you mine on machines you don't own), and heat. Sysadmins notice the odd login. Borrowed machines get cleaned. Push too hard and the attention starts to stack up.
Not a terminal theme, but a whole fictional 8-bit computer, drawn with phosphor glow, scanlines, and a gentle curve at the edge of the glass. The AMY 16 isn't a menu you click through. It's a character, and it's on your side.
The town has a video shop, a dentist, a Sears catalogue under the tree. We render it with affection, not air quotes; it's where the kid lives, not a checklist of things for you to recognise.