Reviews from

in the past


i refuse to play this game until i get a printer capable enough to print out the entire manual so i can fully immerse myself. until then what the fuck am i doing

This is a pretty unique game on paper, where the challenge is to solve the puzzles by forcing yourself to write code and examine manuals. Super fun at first to just give them a go to get some "sea legs" with the coding needed, and how to solve each puzzle, but then the game becomes really challenging. It starts throwing more complicated coding, requiring multiple new pieces of equipment, that were just too difficult for me to put together myself. After I finally looked up the solution for two puzzles, I decided I was defeated and I was done with the game. I did enjoy it, and what it was going for, but without a background in coding, it got too complicated for me to really understand. The final puzzle I attempted that I looked up, the solution worked, but didn't really make sense to me, which is why I knew I was done.

If you've ever wanted to feel like a hardware programmer working in a small Chinese office, then this is the game for you.

The game largely consists of programming challenges that act very similar to coding in Assembly. It's a very novel idea that plays out in interesting ways as you're required to program increasingly complex specifications and working with different hardware. Each device has its own unique set of features and functions to work with and requires you to read a hardware manual which is as tedious as it is immersive.

The games by Zachtronics fall into that weird space between work and play but I think you have to really enjoy programming or at least the logic puzzles that lay within coding for this sort of game to really be enjoyable. I eventually hit a difficulty wall where it started to feel more like work than play and looking at where things go I'm fine stopping where I did.

Game is good, I am dumb. (Won solitaire though!)

As a programmer who loves playing with low-level stuff: why on EARTH haven't I played through this yet. I bought it, played the first puzzle, then completely forgot about it. Definitely very high on the backlog


Estos días en la universidad se han sentido bien

More than any other genre, the puzzle game lives and dies by its tutorial. No one wants to spend too much time on problems that you're supposed to solve without much trouble. Likewise, finally realizing that a particular solution revolves around a mechanic that you weren't entirely familiar with might be the worst feeling a puzzle can produce. Traditionally, every second without full mechanical knowledge is a wasted one, but Shenzhen seems like a rejection of this concept. Instead of a typical tutorial, you're given a 50-page PDF that you have to refer to in order to find out what you can and can't do. Parts aren't immediately useful once you unlock them, at least apparently. Everything is kept within a layer of purposeful haze- when I was nearly finished with the main campaign, I had a realization about how wiring works that would've prevented about ninety percent of my prior struggles if I had figured it out earlier. I should've been frustrated over this, but instead it only left me with ideas on how to improve my past designs. Shenzhen has the foresight to lean into this feeling, explicitly incentivizing players to optimize both their code and their individual production costs. Puzzles aren't simply one-off affairs, but projects to keep coming back to with a new set of experience and thus a new perspective. From what I know about the other Zachtronics games, they're so niche that it seems like a small miracle that they exist in the first place. I can't imagine anyone enjoying this one without at least some familiarity in computer programming, but this also means it's a perfect game to experiment with this kind of unconventional structure. Anyone drawn to Shenzhen almost certainly already has the motivation to improve at the skills it promotes, which a more mainstream puzzle game would have to create from scratch. Instead, Shenzhen gets to focus on creating the best environment possible for utilizing this motivation. The joy of tinkering, the joy of fine-tuning.

Zachtronics, once again.

Last month we had Last Call BBS, which is a great new Zachtronics game, and Shenzhen I/O is here this month, as a programming game for those who want to write some code. Shenzhen I/O is focused on building circuits, which take in inputs from sources and output signals based on those inputs. It is an extremely nerdy programming game but with a solid manual, great style, and a fantastic set of puzzles this is a perfect example of Zachtronics at their best.

There are a lot of different challenges, but most of them involve players laying out processors, and then writing code to control what the objects do. While this is a puzzle game, it’s a puzzle game that’s fully focused on writing assembly code and that will only appeal to some people. This is also a bit of a draining process. I can usually only play through a handful of these puzzles in one sitting before I feel physically tired. Maybe that’s me, but this will challenge even professional programmers.

Pick this up if you want to program or you like Zachtronics. There are a lot of reasons to check out Zachtronics games, and I just did a video detailing most of them, but they’re a special type of puzzle game that is always unique. Here it’s all about coding up the processes running on the chips and then potentially optimizing if you want to challenge the leaderboards. If this looks like fun and you want to learn some assembly check it out.

If you want to see more from me: Check out my video on this month of Game Pass games: https://youtu.be/tgNS9djM5ak

looks interesting and is compelling, unfortunately i am too dumb to play this game

another Zachtronics game that tricks you into doing work but somehow making it fun

Zachtronics' masterpiece: a great difficulty slope, a good mix of puzzles, interesting setups
Great music

Shenzhen I/O is my 4th Zachtronics game, after SpaceChem, TIS-100 and Opus Magnum, and it shares obvious similarities with each of those titles. In addition to the emphasis on programming and refining solutions that all Zachtronics games have, SI/O has a structure strongly reminiscent of Spacechem, a programming language almost identical to that in TIS-100, and a high level of polish with an overall narrative framing device like in Opus Magnum. These similarities end up being both a strength and a weakness, but the headline here is that I really enjoyed Shenzhen I/O, and I'd say it was second only to Opus Magnum.

The game that SI/O has the closest ties to is definitely TIS-100; both games have you using an artificial machine language to programme a machine to solve something approaching a real world problem. In TIS, the problems you solve are pretty fundamental to computing (multiply something by n, sort this list of numbers, etc), whereas in SI/O you are making some product behave in a way specified by the client, sometimes with no further justification. And I have to say I much preferred the problems in TIS; something about solving these classical problems was a lot more satisfying than making a sneaker light up in a given pattern, or something similar. But I think the actual puzzles are probably stronger in SI/O; the ability to place and programme multiple components massively expands the space of possible approaches to each puzzle. The presentation is strong and simple enough that it's still clear what your solution is doing at any given time (this was not true in the similarly structured Spacechem and it was a huge issue), although it can be extremely frustrating when you get a solution you know will work but simply can't rearrange the board to make everything connect up. Moving pieces on the board in general is a bit of a pain in the arse in SI/O, and I can't help but feel this could have been more streamlined.

Something else to note about SI/O is it's very bloody hard. It's incredibly satisfying, sure, but I felt no desire to go back in to improve my solutions once I got something that worked; I was just relieved to have passed that level. I much preferred Opus Magnum's philosophy of not being that difficult to get *a* solution, where you could set your own difficulty by deciding how refined you want all of your machines to be. I'm also not a fan of SI/O hiding a lot of its instructions and requirements in a big 'ol PDF file outside of the game. TIS-100 did this as well, but it's much more egregious in SI/O and I ended up having to tab out to it an awful lot more. The game strongly recommends printing out the PDF to have next to you when playing but... c'mon now, that thing is 47 pages long. I'd really rather there was just a way for me to look at it in game...

But overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It was very satisfying to play, and the moment I got the puzzle completion jingle was always pretty much pure ecstasy. It's bloody hard but not too insane like Spacechem (mostly... I took a look at SI/O's bonus campaign and noped right outta that), and the nice presentation and high degree of polish just make the whole experience more pleasant. It doesn't reach the heights of Opus Magnum, but otherwise this is a strong recommend for weirdos like me who like this kinda shit.

I have no idea what I'm doing but I made the blinky lights do it right

Beginning to think zachtronics makes video games solely as a vehicle for feelies.

Good if you love puzzle games

Driven by a sense of Chinese normality that contrasts nicely with the utopia of the city-state of Avalon, SHENZHEN I/O offers a refined challenge for engineering enthusiasts. In a loose replica of reality, the game creates challenge through artificial limitations that make sense and do not obstruct the satisfaction of achievement. An invisible face in a booming business, our avatar gets to rub shoulders with a fun cast and an exceptional variety of puzzles: few flaws to be found, other than the absence of certain themes in the main campaign – as is not using the Math Co-Processor, the FM-Blaster or the various logic chips.

Better than TIS-100 in my opinion, so realistic for modern reverse engineers who work with unknown appliances, circuit boards daily, trying to poke at them and find out what they do.

You're given a PDF that looks very similar to a real spec sheet for an FPGA or embedded device, you gleam details from it, learn how it works, and develop software to use it.

Was expecting it to be a breeze due to my TIS-100 experience and real world job, there were some INCREDIBLY difficult challenges, I got the world record on one level at one point only to be trumped a few days later, the competition is crazy and the optimisations people are doing to lower the cycle count is truly incredible.

If you're good at this game look for a job in reverse engineering or vulnerability research.

Just enough streamlining to make a puzzle game out of what’s essentially an embedded systems lab course. The UI and presentation throughout is really impressive and attractive, and the music and diegetic storytelling through emails are great too. I was doubtful before about why the solitaire game included on the desktop had been spun off into a separate release, but I get it now; it’s compulsive fun that keeps pulling me back for one more game.

The difficulty curve on the last few engineering puzzles eventually spikes to where even understanding the conceptual requirements felt overly convoluted and like genuinely grueling homework instead of a fun puzzle, but there’s still 20+ satisfying ones before those.

Perhaps it's just due to where I am in my coding career, or perhaps it says more about the kinds of puzzles SHENZHEN I/O throws at you, but this is the first Zachtronics game I haven't dropped after a few hours.

As the problems got harder I started to supress the natural programmer's instinct to prematurely optimise all my code, a path which often ended with wrestling multiple annoying edge cases thanks to the limited instruction set, and instead tried brute forcing the logic by slapping double the chips onto the board. Pleasingly, the game also pushed back on this approach, introducing a meta-layer of trying to get all the wiring to fit next to each other in a limited space, whilst also requiring additional redundant subroutines unconditionally passing data around so that no process gets blocked. Zachtronics games always load on constraints so that problems are non-trivial and often a little fiddly, but only in SHENZHEN I/O have I really enjoyed rubbing up against the limits and finding my own style of working within them without feeling too gross about the compromises. Maybe I can take what I've learnt and beat some of their other games.

Although, maybe it's not worth beating their games. SHENZHEN's ending snuck up on me at what felt like the crescendo of the game's understandably minimal plot. You're left with a false choice that you'd never take in real life, but accepting it is the only way to access the bonus campaign. Maybe I'll leave my principles behind and see what those extra levels are like in a few weeks when I hit a lull in my day job.

Great solitaire entry. Made me think I'd finally 'got' solitaire, but a few rounds of klondike righted that idea.