After 35 hours of gameplay scattered across 5 months, I've taken down another Zachtronics game.
It's been a long journey, and my thoughts are not neatly collected anywhere, so I'll just be writing down the major impressions that stuck with me from March till today. These is more of a thought-dump than a review...
First of all, there are no branching paths. You either beat every level in the story or you don't complete the game. Which is pretty brutal, but if memory serves me right, somewhat typical for Zachtronics. It's not always my favorite aspect of their games, but it does force you to try a level again and again until you figure it out. It surprised me how often I would hit what felt like an unscalable wall only to climb it once I came back with a fresh mind.
I think the level descriptions that laid out the task you had to complete were generally kinda bad. On many different occasions, I wouldn't understand what I had to do to beat the level until I had already spent an hour or so making some design that has one crucial flaw, because I misunderstood the task at hand. It wasn't until the literal last level that I found out you could hold down the "Show Goal" button and scroll to the bottom of your command list to see the exact output needed to beat a level, and I'm not sure if that's entirely on me or not.
I had both of the zines for this game printed out and both were useful, but the most useful 4 pages were the instructions list. It's not really necessary to print out the rest, especially if you have a second monitor, but if you prefer physical books to digital copies, it's a really nice option to consider.
Also I never used SWIZ and I still have no idea what it is useful for even though its like the 3rd instruction listed lol. I hope I didn't miss some amazing trick that would've helped me beat some of the harder levels.
Anyway this game is fun if you like coding challenges, and I'm hungry and going to go eat some chips and salsa
It's been a long journey, and my thoughts are not neatly collected anywhere, so I'll just be writing down the major impressions that stuck with me from March till today. These is more of a thought-dump than a review...
First of all, there are no branching paths. You either beat every level in the story or you don't complete the game. Which is pretty brutal, but if memory serves me right, somewhat typical for Zachtronics. It's not always my favorite aspect of their games, but it does force you to try a level again and again until you figure it out. It surprised me how often I would hit what felt like an unscalable wall only to climb it once I came back with a fresh mind.
I think the level descriptions that laid out the task you had to complete were generally kinda bad. On many different occasions, I wouldn't understand what I had to do to beat the level until I had already spent an hour or so making some design that has one crucial flaw, because I misunderstood the task at hand. It wasn't until the literal last level that I found out you could hold down the "Show Goal" button and scroll to the bottom of your command list to see the exact output needed to beat a level, and I'm not sure if that's entirely on me or not.
I had both of the zines for this game printed out and both were useful, but the most useful 4 pages were the instructions list. It's not really necessary to print out the rest, especially if you have a second monitor, but if you prefer physical books to digital copies, it's a really nice option to consider.
Also I never used SWIZ and I still have no idea what it is useful for even though its like the 3rd instruction listed lol. I hope I didn't miss some amazing trick that would've helped me beat some of the harder levels.
Anyway this game is fun if you like coding challenges, and I'm hungry and going to go eat some chips and salsa