Pretty fun. Nice art style and presentation.

I initially didn't like this much, but after playing TIS-100 and Shenzhen-IO, I grew to appreciate it a lot more. This is definitely the best of those three direct programming zachtronics games

The constraints in this game are unbelievably more lax than those two: you have no time limit, no code limit, and two general purpose registers. Both of those games have some way to work around the ridiculously parsimonious register count, in stack nodes and ram modules, but in EXAPUNKS, files are a lot more flexible than these

As a result of having more powerful tools and fewer restrictions, the problems you solve in EXAPUNKS tend to be more complicated than the other games, but usually not more difficult. I found most of them to be really easy actually, but as usual the bonus campaign includes some really interesting puzzles

The best bonus puzzles add additional interesting restrictions, like "can only have one exa in the network at once", or "exas may die when crossing links". It would be really great if these challenges were more widely distributed. Optimizing size/time is often not that interesting, the latter relies heavily on loop unrolling and the former ... maybe I'm just too dumb for it

So why didn't I initially like this game? I think the story is really clunkily integrated and a lot of the mechanics are not explored as deeply as I would have liked

The retro-futuristic world is cool enough, but your dialog options literally don't matter at all and you can't selectively interact with npcs whenever you want outside of cutscences. You can't interact with the chat room, but the other members immediately react to all your hacks, gas up your performance in hacker battles, and even comment on how you are "only lurking". If Ember will just say and do the same thing no matter what dialog option you pick, and the sentiments are often all the same, why even have the choices? None of Ember's reveals are surprising, and it doesn't make sense why it needs you to do the hacks instead of being able to do them itself since they are pretty easy. If the dialogs did not have options, I wouldn't really be bothered by them, but I don't like the fake choices at all. And staring at the editor can get tiresome, so it would be nice if you could actually chat to the other characters whenever you want, instead of just rewatching cutscenes, even if they just had like two extra text lines between cutscenes

The hacker battles are also disappointing to me. Because "thinking" instructions take up just as much time as "working" instructions, you can't respond to your environment and have to lock in a strategy ahead of time. Against a real person there would in theory be some rock paper scizzors and metagaming at play here since you could try to guess your opponent's strategy and counter it, but most choices are pretty random so you wouldn't get much of an advantage this way, and in practice the npc hacker battles have a locked in, passive, inefficient strategy, so if you just execute the task with unrolled loops and no agression (kill), you'll win with S or S+. Also in hacker battles where there could be an alternate strategy like clogging a server with dropped files, that strategy is banned

Finally, it would have been cool to have some kind of self modifying code

The solitare is not really fun, but hack and mash is really good. The version in last call bbs is a bit better though, and it also comes with dungeons and diagrams which is my favorite side-game

If you like programming games, I would recommend untrusted, a javascript browser game where you have to edit select modifiable parts of the game's source code to progress, and escape from pwny island, which is just an actual capture the flag disguised as an mmo game. In untrusted, the code gives you a good idea of how you might actually structure a simple 2d ascii art adventure game, and you're allowed to do anything you want to the parts of code you can edit, so it's pretty easy if you know javascript, but fun. Pwny island I have not actually played, but it literally gives you a real basic open source mmo and asks you to find and exploit security vulnerabilities in it that are based on real issues found in games like minecraft etc. It kind of ties back to zachtronics with the infiniminer source code leak and subsequent exploits :(. Definitely a much higher level of hacking difficulty, but also unparalleled hacking realism, since the exploits are actual exploits that have existed in actual games

Without doubt, this game is the best introduction to the Zachtronics programming genre. Many reviews here highlight the well-written immersive story, and that is indeed the case. For me, even better was the programming language and development environment are strong enough to meet the challenges that are placed before you. TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O are much more hardcore endeavors where figuring out to implement a sound design is most of the challenge. If you're looking for one game to see if the bundle is right for you, I strongly recommend this one.