It seems like the developers at Klei Entertainment are a bit sadistic, when it comes to how their fans will be able to get their hands on a coveted, yet secret achievement for their latest game, Invisible Inc., on Steam. (thanks for the tip Tsumi, and Brotigan!)

Enthusiastic fans of the game noticed a strange, hidden achievement for the game that has the same requirements as the “Invisible Inc.” achievement, i.e. beating the game on expert. However, the “meta-hacking” achievement had the following in its source files:

if not config.DEV and KLEIAchievements then
–KLEIAchievements:achieve( “META_HACKING” )
end

This particular line of code was commented out, and for those who don’t have a background in code, this means it was deliberately prefaced with characters to render the code inactive in the finished product. Why did Klei Entertainment do this?

Fans thought it was a mistake, or an achievement not fully implemented, until the following patch. The new patch changed the above source code to instead say the following:

if not config.DEV and KLEIAchievements then
— Yes, this achievement exists… No, I’m not giving it away for free. :)
–KLEIAchievements:achieve( “META_HACKING” )
end

Naturally, this is clearly some kind of blatant tease from the developers. Now, the following is entirely provided by the fans of the game, who claim that proceeding with the following steps will unlock the “meta-hacking” achievement, by… literally hacking source files of the game itself.

The outlined steps to hack and unlock the achievement are as follows:

• Step 1-Finding A Thing
  The first thing you want to do is enter Steam/SteamApps/Common/InvisibleInc and unzip or enter the scripts file, which is the folder closest to the bottom. Then, go into “client” find state-main-menu.lua and copy-paste it to wherever you see fit.
• Step 2-Editing The Thing
  Next you need to open your copied file with Sublime, or whatever you use. Now scroll down until you see “–KLEIAchievements:achieve( “META_HACKING” )” and delete the “–” that’s in front of it.
  Then take the edited file and either swap it out with the old file or overwrite it.
• Step 3-Messing With The Anti-Cheat
  Now, go back to SteamApps/Common/InvisibleInc and take out hashes.dat, and make a new one by making a new .txt file and changing the file name to “hashes” and the file extension to “.dat”.
  DO NOT EDIT THE FILE IN ANY WAY.
• Step 4-The Last Part
  Now open up the game and close it. You should now see that you’ve unlocked Meta Hacking
  when you close the game and go back to the game’s info screen. So, congratulations, you’ve now unlocked the achievement! If you haven’t, you’ve screwed up and are a terribly stupid person who probably does not deserve the money you used to buy this game with. Either that or you forgot to put the state-main-menu.lua in. Either/or.

So there you have it. I’ll reiterate that modifying your game in this way is definitely a risk, although it seems to be a very clever way for the developers to literally play a “meta-game” with their fans.