The Signal State
Great little Zach-like. If you like this genre of fiddly little programming games, you’ll like this. If you’re not interested in the genre, you won’t.
Pros of this particular game:
+Charming analog aesthetics. The game’s UI feels very “physical” and low-tech in a neat way.
+Minimalist but reasonably interesting story. I’m all about workers seizing the means of production.
+Good soundtrack. Really helps you get into that zen programming mode.
+More accessible than most games in this genre, as difficulty curve is lower. This might be a con for you, if you’re super good at this genre and really want a challenge, but I think difficulty curve is in that sweet spot challenging without feeling like you now have a second job learning an imaginary programming language.
– Real player with 36.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Tutorial Games.
This game falls short on so many aspects and makes so many dubious design decisions that makes me wonder whether the devs actually know what they’re doing:
- UI/UX:
The main UI, a physical rack representing modules, is just bad, period. Now before you yell blindly, “but node-based programming is the future!”, please note that the game does not feature node-based programming: actual node-based programming would be like Scratch, LabVIEW or Blender nodes. This game’s UI represents specifically DAW skeuomorphism, notably Propellerhead’s Reason. It is also a design decision from the last century, done by nobody else, and being commonly criticized around all the time. Also, DAWs don’t have a million tiny modules like this game.
– Real player with 20.7 hrs in game