Jogado no Xbox Game Pass. Last Call BBS foi definitivamente uma surpresa: uma coletânea de puzzles com temática de computação retrô sempre me pega e vai chamar minha atenção.

Você tem um trabalho bem incrível aqui em cada um dos minigames (e até nas historinhas que você vai desbloqueando conforme vai alcançando coisas nelas). Por mais que nem todos chamaram minha atenção, vale a pena citar alguns:

- Steed Force Hobby Studio, o simulador de montar Gumpla, é definitivamente divertido e eu jogaria um jogo só disso
- Kabufuda Solitaire é uma versão muito legal de Paciência mais simples de jogar e formar estratégias
- 20th Century Food Court é um jogo bizarro em temática e execução, mas um dia eu ainda vou ter força de vontade e terminar mais puzzles
- Dungeons & Diagrams é uma ideia bem legal, mas achei a curva de dificuldade complicada demais...
- ChipWizard Professional é só aula de eletrônica da faculdade e eu me recuso

Every element of this is so clearly crafted with ingenious care and charm: the “dumped on an old desktop” opening that left me to poke around and find the games on the BBS, the diegetic hardware noises lightly grinding and humming away as I interact with the desktop, the quiet drama and characterization of each minigame’s creator spooled out in the notes app as I advance through their respective levels, the subtle autobiographic reflection of Zachtronics themselves seen in the notes, the impeccable visual design of everything. The presentation of all of it adds up to something incredible, even if the puzzles themselves were just okay.

And then the puzzle minigames are a joy to play. Each one is inventively high-concept and poses its own distinct challenge, usually around some sort of programming concept. I’ve finished half of the minigames and look forward to chipping away at the remaining puzzles in the other games as I’m able. Their diversity is a pleasure to bounce between when one has me stumped, and when I’m totally frazzled there’s always the oddly tactile satisfaction of the Steed Force model building app.

Chip Wizard in particular blew my mind. It’s essentially a streamlined CAD program for low-level IC design that strips away the inhibitory math of an upper-level engineering course to reveal the more broadly approachable design puzzles contained within. At the same time, it does a way better job of casually but clearly showing functional IC design concepts (like the difference between NPN and PNP transistors) than a semester or two of most related college courses.

The end of Zachtronics. I’m going to need a moment.

I love Zachtronics games. Everything from Spacechem to Exopunks, so it’s no surprise I’m very happy with Last Call BBS, even if it’s different. Instead of a standard game with a primary focus, Last Call BBS has the player dialing into a BBS and downloading various games. There’s everything from the squelch of the modem, to waiting for files to download, and a timer before players can download the next file.

Last Call BBS has nine apps that players can try out, one of them is an entertaining model builder, but the other 8 are puzzle games in style fans of Zachtronics might recognize, there are two games of solitaire, of course, but there are a solid logic puzzle game, an automation builder, and a circuit diagram game. These are extremely nerdy games, but each of the modules here brought me some joy.

The truth is Last Call BBS is probably what’s left over from Zachtronics, this is going to be the studio’s final new game, they’ll be releasing all their solitaire variants in one more title at the end of the year and the studio is closing and going their own way. But each of the 8 mini-games here feels substantial enough that it’ll give fans of Zachtronics enough for one last hurrah and I bought this on day one on Steam because I’m a die-hard fan of the studio and I wanted to complete my collection, and I don’t regret it at all.

Pick this up if you like logic games, or enjoyed Zachtronics titles before. I’ve always thought of Zachtronics as a studio that makes games for programmers. The games here are puzzle games with a lot of clever bells and whistles, and they also will push the player to try to optimize their solutions, but ultimately, it’s a great experience. As I said, It’s a very nerdy game, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you want to see more from me: Check out my video on this month of Game Pass games: https://youtu.be/2fKlHHe39kE

Being Zachtronics' last (and final) game I was expecting some great or very complicated puzzle adventure but thankfully that wasn't it. Why do I say thankfully? Because what they've left is really neat and that is exactly what you should expect when playing a game of theirs.
It's a collection of games so not all of them might be to your liking but they're there for you and you can play them to your heart's desire, or not. One game in particular became really addictive and kept me stuck to the screen for the whole game but apart from that they're all solid puzzles. Definitely a great goodbye

A puzzle collection with a great frame that makes it better than the sum of its parts.

Goofing around on an old, second hand computer gave me permission to play differently than I'd approach a mini game collection presented to me in a flat menu. Bouncing between games felt more like exploring than losing interest.

I really like how the rules of each game aren't immediately presented, and often times are intentionally incomplete. Figuring out how to play is the first puzzle of every game.

What an immensely sad game.

Zachtronics have done an outstanding job of capturing the melancholy of witnessing an age turning bygone, doubtlessly mirroring the shuttering of the studio with this final release. Last Call BBS is a world of dial-up, of warez, of cracks and hacks, of archaic hardware, and the inherent mystery that comes with exploring obscure corners of the internet. A descriptive blurb and a title are the only things you'll get to inform you about the games you'll be playing, all curated on a local server by the in-game barkeep. It's the kind of "search, experiment, and figure it out yourself" gameplay that's defined virtually every Zachtronics title up to this point, now extending into the meta act of finding and downloading the games to be played.

Of course, the extra layer of navigating a virtual desktop with limited hard drive space doesn't come at the cost of compromising the quality of these games; to the contrary, these are some incredibly impressive titles. Dungeons & Diagrams is a fun Picross-like, the included Solitaire variants are as entertaining as they always are, HACKMATCH is back and expanded, and you've got your completely incomprehensible puzzle games like X'BPGH: The Forbidden Path and "ChipWizard Professional" to help round things out. The last game I mentioned is jokingly referred to in-universe as being indistinguishable as one of either "a game or a CAD program", and they mean it.

You'll probably have noticed from the big, glowing red dot at the top of this review that I've got this marked as abandoned. I didn't finish Last Call, so I couldn't mark it as completed. I don't think I'll ever finish Last Call, so I can't mark it as shelved. This is a dense game. There's a lot here, and I'm not smart enough to see it all through. Okay, it's not that I'm dumb, it's that I don't have a natural acumen for solving the sorts of puzzles that Last Call presents, and I can't seem to learn the skills required to even begin the process. If there's some means of discovering a definitive end to this, I'm not going to see it.

So, I'm a little reticent to publish a review on this. I'm abandoning a game that I liked, a lot. Games which I've enjoyed have managed to sour massively for me as they went on — see Immortality and Asura's Wrath if you need examples — so who's to say that the same couldn't happen for Last Call? There might be later games or puzzles or twists that completely, utterly, retroactively spoil the whole thing. Now, I doubt that's going to happen, but it could.

Even in that theoretical worst outcome, though, I think I've enjoyed too much of Last Call to imagine my opinion lowering far from where it already is. The real joy is in picking and choosing what parts you want to work through, rather than forcing yourself to tackle every single piece of every last bit of content, squeezing out whatever juice you can get before discarding it and moving to the next thing. I'd dare to call Last Call "anti-completionist", provided I felt like justifying that opinion with another eight paragraphs of argumentation.

In a package that's this brimming with games, it's inevitable that you'll find at least something you enjoy. If you want some beginner-level puzzles, you play Dungeons & Diagrams. If you want to ramp up the difficulty and seriously challenge yourself, you play ChipWizard. If you're sick of all of the puzzles and you don't want to think anymore, you play STEED FORCE Hobby Studio and quietly assemble virtual gunpla kits. If you're one of those twisted bastards that actually thought TIS-100 was fun, you can read up on the included Axiom QuickServe dev guides and create your own JavaScript-based "servers" that other players can dial into and play custom games from.

Zach Barth seems to be leaving games behind in favor of teaching, per what I've seen strewn about the Internet. Apparently he got a taste for instructing high school programming classes, and it's became a passion that he wanted to pursue. There have been some pretty negative reactions to this, which surprised me; even as an outsider to the Zachtronics collection, it isn't hard to see that the act of education and the reciprocal act of learning is the through-line connecting their entire catalog.

Of course, Barth later said that he has "a hard time imagining anything other than games in [his] future", even though the team that made up Zachtronics will be disbanding. After being a part of the field for two decades, I suppose it's hard for anyone to imagine him being anywhere else.

Last Call BBS is a wonderful capstone to mourn and celebrate the way that the Internet used to be. I couldn't think of a better way for Zachtronics to close their doors than with this.

All of the quintessential Zachtronics games have their shelf life for me. This is generally either through a bit too much repetition, or through the expanding scope growing too much to keep track of everything. But they are all so well-designed that they are fun while they last. This one certainly lasted the longest, and it did so while exuding a ton of heart. The variety of games and the trickle of notes made it a joy to bounce around when one set of mechanics started to bring out that perfectionist itch a bit too much.

It was a genius decision to have the downloads work in the background, as it definitely led me to tinker with games for longer than I normally would have (if at all). Those sections ended up being as well-crafted and enjoyable as any vignettes throughout gaming.

This game also balances humor and emotion as well as any text in games. We see the anthropological detail from Mr Chilly that 20th century soft-serve was clearly enjoyed at a temperature of absolute zero. We see the computer's original owner vulnerably offering up this hardware as a piece of himself, recounting the wistful what-ifs that we all experience throughout life, and celebrating the people who shape your life even as the decades pass since you've been in their presence.

This may be a game to play over the years, dipping in and out to complete more puzzles and find more notes. It may even eventually become its own wistful memory as we try to recount to the next generation who we were back before Zachmatics disappeared from the golden ages...

Affectionate in gesture and execution. A lot of people on this website (and like hey this is just how time works) didn't have enough exposure to Pre-Windows 2000 era computers to really, really understand how wild of a world computers felt back then. Before things had to be designed to death to make it in front of an audience, some machines worked Just Enough to let you do what they wanted. I remember coloring black & white still frames from Batman: The Animated Series on the old church's computer. I remember the one time I got to use the pastor's computer and discovered they had a PC port of Mortal Kombat 3 installed to it for some reason I am still not capable of figuring out (They Were Weird, It's A Long Story). Trying AOL and realizing it wasn't good enough. Downloading a demo overnight only to learn it didn't run on my computer the morning after. My father's... aggressive approach to hacking prevention. This game is a dream about gilded ages, re-created with ship-in-a-bottle precision.

I've given up for now because my save doesn't seem to be taking, I can only assume this is my sponging ass using gamepass to play this, me and gamepass? We don't get along so good sometimes.

Putting that aside what a game! looks and acts like an older PC model when things weren't yet set in stone, reminding me a lot of hypnospace outlaw, hearkening back to the early internet era but without trying to perfectly replicate it.

Theres something about nostalgia when it's....not trying to be perfect....for some reason thats better? I'm not sure why.

The game selection available here is fantastic, I've discovered I'm bad at (both) types of solitare, I can't build food assembly factories to save my life and my brain melted trying to map out dungeons, the gunpla game was the icing on the cake, I've had a fun time with this one, highly recommend it.

A fun collection of different kinds of puzzle games, each one having their own feel and mood to it done in the old computer ascetic. As you progressed though one of the 7 game you start to get background story about the creators witch was a nice touch and added more incentive to finish them.

The games throw you into the deep end in terms with how to play them, where you have to either go though the instruction manual or just have to figure it out on your own. Which kind of added to the charm of the whole thing.

Out of the 7 games I would say that dungeons and diagrams, and 20th century food court where the best ones. I'm blanking on the name at the moment, but the only game I did not complete was the Japanese arcade style game as the later levels in that got too frustrating.

Would recommend for anyone who likes challenging puzzle games.

Like many a Zachtronics game before, Last Call BBS has that secret ingredient to create a great puzzle format: arbitrary limitation.

Perhaps intentionally, the computer you are using only has enough disk space to download 7 programs, most of which have their own limitation. For ChipWizard and Food Court, the limit was simply workspace, a pretty common trope for Zachtronics, although for Food Court there are two ways space is restricted. For X'BPGH, interestingly, it was time (as displayed through stages of growth). There was also an instruction limit, but I don't think I ever ran out of space for instructions.

For the others, there might not be any clear limitation. Kabufuda cards existed before Last Call BBS, but I don't know if Kabufuda Solitaire existed. The free spaces certainly had increasing limits with higher difficulty. Dungeons & Diagrams had restrictions for block placement, but that's not really unusual for a logic puzzle (in fact a lot of the rules carry over from a logic puzzle known as Tapa). Steed Force could be considered to have a quite limited variety of tools for painting Gundam-like figures. HACKMATCH might not even qualify.

I'd be remiss not to mention some of these games had their first appearance in a previous Zachtronics game. A nearly identical version of Kabufuda Solitaire was present in Eliza. A fairly similar version of HACKMATCH in EXAPUNKS. ChipWizard's first incarnation was KOHCTPYKTOP, released all the way back in 2009 as a flash game. There may be others that I don't know about.

And I think the narrative that played out through memos from the relative who had donated the Z5 Powerlance to the player hints towards a past where arbitrary restrictions were not an option, they were reality. Graphics were limited to smaller resolutions, smaller budgets, smaller memory allocation, and smaller, closer-knit (more closely knit?) communities who came together to play these games and just chat.

The world's a lot bigger than it was when Zachtronics began. Things move faster. LC makes you wait when downloading a game, although the files of the game were all loaded up upon booting up Last Call BBS on Steam. It might've taken you less time to download LC than it took to download any game within it.

I don't think Zach Barth was trying to communicate there is no place for Zachtronics anymore, or that he was out of ideas. I think he just had a good idea of where he wanted to stop.

Eu acho o conceito desse jogo muito interessante. Que é emular um sistema antigo e te dar acesso a um computador de outra pessoa e um canal do BBS. Eu nunca vivi a internet dessa época, mas mesmo assim o jogo é efetivo em evocar uma nostalgia.

Fuçar no computador de outra pessoa e ir descobrindo os minigames é bem intrigante. Porém ao mesmo tempo que a simulação é boa e realista, isso também deixa o jogo meio chato pra mim. Tipo ter limite de download e você precisar esperar quinze minutos de tempo REAL pra poder baixar outro jogo.

Os mini games em si são legais, mas nada que me fisgou por muito tempo. Como tudo tenta emular jogos daquela época, você meio que tem que ler manuais e descobrir por si só o que fazer. O que de novo, é MUITO interessante, mas ao mesmo tempo me deu uma preguiça enorme.

Gostei muito do joguinho de montar gunplas, mas fiquei frustrada com o quão ruim são os controles pra pintar os robozinhos.

Enfim, é um jogo muito curioso e eu fico feliz de ter testado, apesar de não ser muito pra mim.

какой-то вообще сюровый экспириенс, типа ты на своем компе как будто запускаешь эмулятор какого-то ретро несуществующего компа с операционкой и несколькими программами и играми. Ты буквально качаешь там эти проги с сайта и тп (внутри игры). Среди игр есть например японские карты ханафуда - интересная интерпритация пасьянса и симулятор сборки пластиковых моделей роботов из гандама, в сборке роботов я хз сколько часов провёл, меня буквально затянуло, там настолько проработано всё, это буквально симулятор. С прохождением уровней в играх тебе открываются записки чела который эту всю операционку создал, в которых он рассказыает о жизни своей и это как-то ностальгично и приятно читать. Очень понравилось, очень странно, класс ваще.

Beautiful and vibrant set of puzzle games, with a theming to die for, and a solution to the problem that plagues the genre: what do you do when you get stuck? Just play one of the other eight games in the BBS, of course!

Unfortunately eventually you finish the games you can finish and you're still stuck, and the two games in this collection that are "classic zachtronics" – meaning, effectively coding puzzles in disguise – are each incredibly tricky. The one action game in the collection also failed to click for me, though it wasn't helped by being played on Steam Deck without an appropriate control scheme.

20th Century Food Court: 4 ☆
STEED FORCE Hobby Studio: 1.5☆
X’BPGH: 3☆
Sawayama Solitaire: 2.5☆
Dungeons & Diagrams: 3.5☆
ChipWizard™ Professional: 3.5☆
HACK*MATCH: 4☆ (buen temardo)
Kabufuda Solitaire: 2.5☆