Packer is a medium level reverse engineering CTF from pico.
Should've realised from the name the file was packed.
Initially opened the file in IDA which revealed nothing since it was packed, saw from the hint that the file size had been reduced. Ran the strings command and found out it had been packed using UPX so I unpacked it and ran strings again, and boom! got the flag.
It was in hex format too and I decrypt it using cyberchef
NewerOlder