Exapunks is another neat little Zachtronics game about programming and solving complex puzzles through an interesting storyline about hacking, capitalism, physical media and the like. Much like their previous games, such as TIS-100, you’ll tackle challenges, write code using a small vocabulary - that still allows a lot to be done - and get ranked amongst your friends and the global player base. I had a good time with it, although I found the back-and-forth between a PDF and the game a bit tedious and got stuck fairly early.
As a hacker that needs to make money in order to afford medication, the game takes a small jab at the gig economy before switching to the meat and potatoes of its mechanics, mainly hacking. Following tutorials in ‘zines’ (that in my case were PDFs because I really couldn’t get them printed) you learn simple tasks for your EXAs. These are small robots that can move around network locations, pick up files, read their content, check simple conditions, and other things of that nature.
The puzzles and difficulty increase because of the large number of things you can do with such a small number of operations. You can’t do loops in code, you can’t do complex checks, everything you write takes a lot of tines and you have a size limit, etc., so it can become a little frustrating at times. I still managed to solve a bunch of puzzles that I thought I wouldn’t be able to, like splitting my EXAs to find a file hidden somewhere. The game also throws a small card game at you, and then changes the format of the puzzles to feel like competitions, you can hack your own body, and there’s a game console thrown in there as well, it helps build up the atmosphere and it’s pretty fun to switch gears from time to time.
Ultimately, having no in-game help and needing to find the information in an external PDF was a pain for me, the number of times where I resumed playing and needed to go look up if the instruction to move my EXAs was MOVE, JUMP or LINK and then needed to go read the documentation on how SWIZ works again, by alt-tabbing out of the game into a PDF weren’t great. This is certainly not a huge knock against it, Exapunks captures the Zachtronics magic really well and I recommend it to the programming-for-fun types. Just know what you get into!
