Reseñas

• gamedeal user

  Dec 5, 2021

  I feel like I need to start the review by saying that I have a BS in Computer Science, and a PhD in a computational field... I've been programming for 20+ years although nowadays spend most my time overseeing an organization and not doing the coding that got me here. For me, this game is wonderful. It takes me back to days of pushing code through an autograder program, learning assembly. It's a ton of fun programming assembly is something you think would be fun. If not, then stay far far away as it definitely has a huge difficulty/learning curve, especially if you've never programmed before!
• gamedeal user

  Dec 22, 2021

  Procrastinate doing actual programming by playing a game about programming. 10/10
• gamedeal user

  Jan 5, 2022

  I tried Shenzen I/O and SpaceChem but didn't really get into either. This is the Zachtronics game that finally hooked me.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 24, 2022

  I used to play SHENZHEN.IO to learn assembly for my CS degree. Now, I [i][b]need[/b][/i] a CS degree to even finish EXAPUNKS. 11/10 would suffer again
• gamedeal user

  Jul 16, 2022

  If you're like me and you A) play a lot of puzzle games and B) don't know a lick of programming, you've probably had this game hovering around your awareness for ages but have always bounced off of it because it looks very much "not for you" but I have to say it's worth a shot. The programming "language" is very simple with only a couple of dozen terms and rules to have to wrestle with and its limitations create that really ever so elusive feeling in puzzlers where you're given some toothpicks and told to build the Eiffel Tower and at first you're completely stumped at how you could ever be expected to complete such a task but eventually you figure it out in fits and starts and when you look back over the what you made, you feel a weird kind of pride for having figured out how to turn these pointy little sticks into something grand. That's what Exapunks does: these weird little commands and concepts start out as esoteric and confusing and soon you're mastering them, seeing the logic in them and understanding intuitively how to connect them to build something bigger than the sum of its parts. Once you've acquired mastery of the basic concepts, it keeps challenging you to push further, to think about them from different angles. It gives it this real feeling of "easy to learn, hard to master" where you start out being challenged by "how do I do this basic thing" and end up having to think about "I know how to do this basic thing, but now I need to think about how to do it multiple times in parallel". This kind of "easy core concepts to learn that are difficult to master" is the purest essence of what makes puzzle games so damn appealing and it's probably why so many of my peers ended up becoming programmers. Who knows. I do know that spending 6 hours grinding away at the UC-Berkeley puzzle and watching my inelegant, ugly, horrendously inefficient code tick away at the solutions is one of my fondest moments of gaming because *I* figured out the logic to make it work. Isn't that why we play puzzlers? Definitely helping things is the story: it's got this 90s retro-punk aesthetic that feels like when we all thought Game Boys were the end of technology, when we sat in dark rooms lit by the humming monochrome CRT, and thought that General Magic and Windows 95 were going to change the world. The game's "language" is taught through underground zines and there's this ugly cyberpunk aesthetic to everything that's so charming. So yeah, don't get turned off by the "coding" if you're into puzzle games because the latter is what it is, first and foremost: a puzzle game. Just one where the puzzle pieces look like words.
• drurowin

  Apr 16, 2023

  Disclosure: I am a programmer. I learned to program on the Z80, first in TI-BASIC then assembly. This is like that but harder, but also as colorful as kid pix and has great hacker-friendly tunes and a story that's far too interesting for a puzzle game where you type actual assembly code as the core gameplay component. The instruction set is SIGNIFICANTLY restrictive. Some reviews say this is bad. Those reviews miss the point of hacker culture. It wouldn't be fun if the instruction set had niceties like, oh, subroutines. Also, don't print the zines with the duplexer set to long edge unless you want to relive figuring out how to manually print double-sided before the print dialogue gave instructions on how to do that. (The result is, admittedly, amusing, and reminds me of grade school when teachers messed up the duplexer and you had to constantly flip the packets. I think I'll keep that batch... add some authenticity. Thanks, Zach. I'd forgotten about that.)
• Dezalk

  Jun 13, 2023

  xa; link 800; copy 1 #steamreview; halt
• csessh

  Jul 11, 2023

  Because looking at code all day at work just isn't enough.
• Cowboy

  Aug 13, 2023

  Nice and complex. Bring your brain and have a pen and paper to hand.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 10, 2018

  A highly polished puzzle game that should be quite fun for anyone interested in programming puzzles. The game is much more engaging than previous titles like TIS-100 thanks to loads of beautiful retro art and a more fleshed-out narrative. The game is still more complex than the likes of Human Resource Machine but seems significantly more approachable than something like TIS-100. Seems to work quite well on linux, too. As for a criticism, this game falls into the same stat trap as HRM. After completing a puzzle, you're presented with the number of steps your solution took and the number of lines of code you had (allowing you to optimize for space or for speed, as programmers are taught to do). However, some puzzles will have a specific solution that is highly optimized for one or the other. That solution tends to essentially rely on hardcoded exploitation. Each puzzle requires you to pass 100 randomized tests (like fuzzing tests) to make sure you didn't just hardcode the solution for the one specific problem you were given. But that randomization doesn't always go far enough to catch all the edge cases. Case in point, the puzzle where you have to empty the bank's ATMs. You're only allowed to empty one bill at a time from a given ATM and fail if you request something from an empty ATM, so the "nominal" solution averages something like 3000 cycles. However, the "randomized" tests never seed an ATM with fewer than ~30 bills, so the speed-optimized solution is to have two loops: one empties 28 or 29 bills in a row before checking on the counter and another empties one bill at a time, once the counter gets below 28 or 29. That drops the time to around 1000 cycles or so. But it's clearly not representative of the spirit of the challenge (where an ATM certainly could have fewer than 20 or 30 bills). Similarly, there was another puzzle where the speed-optimized solution was just to copy and paste the same line many times in a row before entering your loop, as none of the tests required fewer than a certain number of iterations. Half of real-world programming is just error-checking and cautious code to navigate all the edge cases. It might be nice if programming puzzle games (after so many iterations) didn't allow so much latitude for overfitting solutions to the exact parameters of a given problem.