Exapunks takes the broader mechanics of assembly coding and turns it into a puzzle game. At the same time it weaves together a cute cyberpunk narrative that has you hacking body parts, government servers, and nuclear reactors.

While most programming games tend to have you running command lines and work at the front end of computing, Exapunks goes into the metal and has you programming little robots to perform functions akin to assembly instructions. The concept is clever and the unique approach works well. The visuals are sharp and have a cassette futurism feel that looks wonderful, and the music has that classic Zachtronics 'music to think to' vibe.

For the moment to moment gameplay each mission has a clear objective and you program one or more bots to manipulate files and data using 4 registers with different limitations. It's these limitations that encourage you to find creative and compact programming solutions. You're scored based on the size of the code, number of bots, and how your code takes to solve the problem. This can give you clear insights, such as when you see that most people made the code just a little more efficient encouraging you to go back and optimise.

The gameplay is mixed with a pair of real PDF 'zines which teach you the finer details of how tech works in this world and gradually introduces more complex ways you can instruct the bots. The multimedia approach is fun and adds to the immersion, though you have to be somewhat bought in to sit down and read what is basically an series of instruction manual snipets.

Personally Exapunks does a lot that I enjoy, the story is a bit cliche but it's a fun excuse for the interesting and varied challenges thrown at you - the different themes and secrets hidden add some nice depth. Zachsoft games can be intimidating but this is a good place for beginners to start and if you're an experienced programmer you're still going to learn something about optimisation. Smart, stylish, and good fun.

Aesthetically, mentally, and musically rich. Exapunks delivers on challenging, creative, and narratively interesting hacker puzzles (even if some of them take a bit to long to write and test for). These puzzles are held up by a foundation of amazing world and environment choices. Tutorializing through hand-delivered zines is what puts the 'punk' in Exapunks, beyond being fun souvenirs. You genuinely have to rely on anarchist, independent publishing for photoscans of documentation. Turning that grass-roots knowledge into independent action, both for real personal and community benefit and just to screw with people because you can, empowers the player to hack by and for themselves. Having access to a chatroom of room-temperature IQ nerds for exposition is another great touch. It makes the world, already supported by NPC interaction, puzzles, and the zines, feel that bit more real.

I feel like the art and voices are drawn and performed very cleanly, a bit too cleanly, for this kind of game. I'm fine with saying that the art is overly clean/safe to give a visual comparison to the player's world of exas and the actual material world they live in, but not the voice work. It's done well by the actors, but it's presented in a very sanitized way. It's like every character is a GPS voice. Real people don't sound that 'mastered' in real life, you know?

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

Another excellent programming puzzle game from Zachtronics. I'm a sucker for touches like tucking away the documentation inside printable zines with extra worldbuilding, and I really enjoyed trying to work around the kinds of very limited constraints that Exapunks revels in. (My kingdom for just one more register!)

Besides the main programming puzzles, there's also the obligatory solitaire variant (which I always enjoy), an arcade puzzle game (I'm no better at it than I was at the expanded version in Last Call BBS, that whole genre isn't really my thing but I'm sure other people will have fun with it), a level editor, a multiplayer hacker battle mode (I didn't try it myself but the hacker battle levels in the main campaign were neat), and wildly, a sandbox for making your own video games for a virtual handheld console, using the same assembly language that you solve the game's levels with. The thought of trying to make a video game within Exapunks' constraints is staggering to me, but then again people have made playable games in everything from Minecraft to Baba Is You, so I'm sure some ambitious programmers out there have actually made use of it.

Anyways, I thought the final level was gonna be the death of me, but I did conquer it in the end and it was immensely satisfying. Probably gonna give Exapunks a rest for now and save the post-game bonus levels for later since I'm currently feeling kinda at my limit with the game, but overall I had a great time with it.