Monster Logic
One of the best programming games I’ve played. Lots of levels and a variety of interesting ways to solve each one.. Competitive leaderboards, the top score in some of these puzzle are already pretty crazy. You are going to have to be super creative in order to match them. There are three categories for the leaderboards and your best score in each category for the puzzle is automatically saved. (Zachtrnoics take note please)
I have played almost every programming game on steam and this is probably my second favorite. With my favorite being EXAPUNKS
– Real player with 86.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult Programming Games.
First off, I was a beta tester and received the game for free.
It might be scary for those who are not particularly into programming to look at the store page and see stuff like “Based on esoteric programming languages Befunge and Trefunge”. It could make you think this game is “too niche” and not for you.
Now, I don’t know whether you’ll actually like it or not, but let me tell you this: I had never even heard of Befunge or Trefunge before playing this, and I’m not a programming enthusiast or anything. I just looked at it as a fun puzzle game with cute monsters and animations and tried to solve the levels as best I could using good old logic.
– Real player with 54.5 hrs in game
SHENZHEN I/O
10/10
I had a lot of spare time over a 4 day period and 40+ hours of that time went into this game alone, nothing can describe enough how amazing this game is. The core of this game can be summed up with the phrase ‘fun embedded electronics programming’, it’s not overly complicated but will also pose a challenge to those out there who love solving puzzles or optimising code.
The game is simple to start playing, you are placed onto a dashboard with 2 main buttons ‘conceptMAIL’ and ‘Datasheets’. Your first email will ask you to read through the ‘Datasheets’ which is a printable PDF ( you don’t have to print it, but it does make referencing easier ), it’s a fairly short read and is something you can come back to if you’ve any queries or is required for your project. Once you’re finished, you can start your first lot of puzzles, which eases you into the UI and teaches you the basic principles of I/O control.
– Real player with 80.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult Programming Games.
You may be wondering why I’m thumbing down a game I’ve spent over 70 hours playing. I did enjoy the game, but I simply cannot recommend it to anyone except the most hardcore fans of Zachtronics' other games. And Shenzhen I/O is the only Zachtronics game which I’ve had no desire to replay.
My biggest complaint is the size of the boards. They are unfairly small.
In Zach’s other games, constantly adding and testing parts is how I would work my way through the logic of the puzzle, step by step. You could make a big messy solution at first, and then worry about optimizing it later. But Shenzhen I/O actively discourages you from playing this way, especially after the first campaign is over. There is simply not enough room on the later boards to reasonably work with.
– Real player with 77.9 hrs in game
SpaceChem
What is SpaceChem?
SpaceChem is a chemistry-themed programming puzzle game (no actual chemistry or programming knowledge required).
Spacechem is moving stuff from one side of the screen to the other while rearranging it a bit.
Spacechem isn’t finding the unique solution, it’s creating your unique solution.
Spacechem is the elegance of a brilliantly simple solution.
Spacechem is the elegance of a solution you know is a terrible wall of spaghetti, but it’s your wall of spaghetti, dammit!
– Real player with 2677.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult Puzzle Games.
When I first read about the puzzle games by Zachtronics, the promises were to good for mathematics and IT affectionate people like I consider myself so that I soon had to buy one, I didn’t wait for a sale and took SpaceChem for the simple reason of being one of the older and therefore cheaper games, Never would I have expected to play it THAT much.
After 90 hours of gameplay, which I had in less than 3 weeks, I did all the challenges, optimized some solutions in a battle with a friend and also did some of the community levels from “ResearchNet”, but I was stuck at the level “Omega-Pseudoethyne” on the next to last planet. There was just so much logic to cram into two reactors, that I tried and tried but couldn’t come up with the right approach. I watched some solutions on Youtube, but was fortunately to proud to just copy one. After putting the game aside for a few months, I tried it again and did it. The feeling of success was immense, even though the statistics that can be seen in a histogram after each level were bad.
– Real player with 137.2 hrs in game
Contraption Maker
I used to like this game. A lot. I won firts place in one of their contests, and second place in another. For which I received reward in the form of steam games. Contraption maker is a great example of a game that never stops growing. Even now, they keep adding new content to it.
But… things havetemporarily changed.
Top Meadow and Game Dev Castle took over the development and publishing of the game, and I get the feeling that they don’t really care about the game itself anymore. They look at things from a rather business perspective which is bad for this type of game’s health. I am talking about DLC packs, and the fact that they ruin this game’s fun of uploading and sharing contraptions, puzzles and mods.
– Real player with 205.6 hrs in game
If I think about my earliest days of video gaming, back before I got into my classic platformers like Sonic the Hedgehog, the title that stands out to me the most (amidst many education-focused games) was The Incredible Machine. A game that tests your ingenuity to solve puzzles, and your imagination to create them. Many of my fondest gaming memories from those days came from T.I.M. I got this game when it was in alpha, and the fact that I got to play any part in this game’s development, even just by messing around with the parts and reporting bugs, is something truly special to me.
– Real player with 37.8 hrs in game
Neon Noodles - Cyberpunk Kitchen Automation
So much that I like about this game. I liked the idea of Overcooked, but it was always too frantic for me and in Neon Noodles I like taking time to plan and be an efficient chef. Designing the layout and instructions is intuitive and works well even with a controller. The UI is clean and clearly communicates, while still looking really good. Building something that works first, and then optimizing it based on the 3 categories (roughly space, time, and complexity) adds additional challenges. It makes me want to cook all of these delicious recipes.
– Real player with 13.3 hrs in game
Selecting to play a new game from the main menu screen will take you to the level screen. Choosing to continue a previous game from the main menu will take you to the game level you’re currently on. On the first level Sliced Avocado, you’ll be welcomed to Neon Noodles! From here you’ll continue an existing program and be instructed on what to do. You will also get more information as you progress through the levels.
– Real player with 10.9 hrs in game
Assignment 42
Very delicious robot game where you navigate between rooms and use robots to solve problems. For some reason at level three it didn’t run for me. But as I try to point out in many of my reviews. I has potato.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
Great game controlling your robot. And evacuating hostage.
– Real player with 3.2 hrs in game
GLADIABOTS - AI Combat Arena
This is a superb, unique game that deserves to be even more popular than it already is.
The concept of the game is that the player designs their own AI via customizable ‘nodes’ (colour-coded tiles that the player can arrange into a logic tree to determine their robots' behaviour) which then dictate how their team of 4-8 robots (from four different classes) perform in battle against ‘enemy’ AIs.
The logical array which the player creates (featured in several of the screenshots in the store page) can be anywhere from just a handful of tiles at first, to literally hundreds (arranged into named sub-AIs if the player wants) that function like a sort of flow diagram for each robot, governing their priorities and thus responses based on a seemingly endless combination of determining factors e.g. what friendly or enemy bots are doing at that particular moment, how far away they are, or hundreds of other parameters native to the ‘check-box’ like options that allow the player to refine what each tile actually ‘says’.
– Real player with 478.5 hrs in game
In Gladiabots you programm a platoon of robots that will then compete autonomously in a game arena against other platoons. You have to plan and consider carefully when creating your robots' AIs before actually hitting the arena as you can no longer interfere once the match has started: The robots are then on their own, equipped with nothing but your programmed instructions.
There are four different bot classes resembling a rock scissors paper scheme with an added tank and several different game modes (three for online ranked matches vs humans).
– Real player with 364.7 hrs in game
Infinifactory
Infinifactory is the best puzzle game I’ve ever played. It takes something truly compelling for me to spend hours, sometimes days at the end, perfecting a single puzzle, and yet I have never felt frustrated. This is a game that truly earns the description ‘engaging.’
Everything that happens in this game is because you made it, and you need to have your brain firing on all cylinders to make it through. But fear not, any new players considering this game: the mechanics are easy to approach and you’ll be hooked in no time. Players who have enjoyed any other game by Zachtronics (like Spacechem or TIS-100) or who like similar games with similar mechanics (Factorio, Big Pharma, even the city-builder games by Impressions) will absolutely love Infinifactory, but I think anyone willing to giving Infinifactory a chance will love it too.
– Real player with 574.9 hrs in game
This game puts you in the position of an alien abtuctee that is tasked with manufacturing various constructions from supplied materials for your new masters. Your role is to design and construct the “factory” to make each construction. In order to prove that your process works, you must deliver 10 perfect copies of the requested item to a “scanner” that validates that each copy delivered is correct. As you progress, you are given additional tools, more challenging conditions/restrictions and more complicated items to assemble.
– Real player with 181.1 hrs in game
TIS-100
TL;DR: 4/5 - Give it a try, especially if you like optimising and fiddling with code.
I’ve played a fair bit now and, to me, this is one of the best puzzlers I’ve ever played.
A few words about the gameplay in case you wonder: The game consists of 48 levels, each a programming task. Looking at the first screenshot here on Steam should show you the level SEQUENCE COUNTER. In the upper left corner you have your task. The 12 squares that take almost all of the screen are “nodes”, independent CPUs that you can program freely with up to 15 instructions each. The arrows between them are “ports” that allow you to move data between nodes. There are also input and output ports at the top and at the bottom of the screen, respectively. Your program has to stand four tests, three with predefined inputs and one with random values. You can see the given inputs and expected outputs on the left in the screenshot.
– Real player with 656.7 hrs in game
This is my second review on Steam and I felt that this game deserved it. I’ve just completed this game with 100% achievements and I’ve spent more hours on this game than obtaining 100% achievements for Dark Souls 1 & 2, but quite a number of it was probably spent falling asleep. The only thing these games have in common is that you’d be on the verge of giving up but you know they are solvable problems because many before you have done so. I studied electrical engineering and I do a fair bit of coding in my work so the workings of assembly wasn’t entirely foreign to me, and I knew the basics of debugging and using pseudo-code to formulate solutions. I’ve a few tips below:
– Real player with 172.9 hrs in game
EXAPUNKS
The best “Zach-like” game yet. Even if it is by Zach.
Another excellent puzzle game from Zachtronics. If you’ve never played a game like this before, this is an open-ended puzzle game. By “open-ended” I mean there is a problem you are trying to solve, and you are given tools (in this case a programming language for what appears to be tiny robots) to solve it as you choose. You build a solution to the presented problem. You win if the solution works but how you get to a working solution is up to you. There are limits to your freedom both by the language and what the “little robots” can accomplish at one time. The puzzle here revolves around writing little program fragments that unfold through parallelization into pretty impressive results. It is a complete programming language (although a very simple one) and even has a little test-bed where you can make your own creation without a specific goal.
– Real player with 107.5 hrs in game
The first Zachtronic game I found myself being able to complete and with extremely minimal help, more so due to that some puzzles are difficult to understand rather than writing the code itself. Even though the game does get hard, it does an excellent job of preparing you for the difficulty ahead. Even without any programming knowledge, you’ll be able to overcome the challenges this game poses. You can always see the exact end state the game wants you to leave the board in at any time, which serves as an excellent guide in what you’re meant to do.
– Real player with 87.6 hrs in game