Human Resource Machine

While this is definitely a game I would recommend to someone who wants a taste of what programming is like, it is one I would recommend getting on sale. It has some serious balance issues, especially towards the end. But you really should only get into this game if such things appeal to you, as the meta-story to this game isn't going to offer much in it's own.... unlike everything else I've played by these people.

I find it hard not to recommend because of its character, sense of humor and some challenging puzzles. However, I lost desire to play it before and it took me very long to come back to and complete, because of issues that, for me, took the fun out one too many times. The first problem is that the puzzles were all over the place. Maybe it's my lack of intelligence but I often had puzzles that were incredibly easy followed by something many times more complex. The complexity even had me thinking that I was coming up with ridiculous solutions, but I usually did end up close to or at their optimization challenge levels. The second, and biggest, problem was the interface to input the solution. Thinking about a solution is fun but mapping it out is not. It's just one long column where you stack commands, so if you have to branch out in your solution it can quickly become hard to follow and hard to debug. It can also take a while to reach a section in your programming if you want to test it. It's a guy running around moving boxes, you can fast forward but in later levels it's really not that fast when dealing with long strings. The third problem is that the assignments are not always clear enough. The first presentation is a funny one so doesn't always tell a lot. You do get an explanation and examples but I was still occasionally surprised by inputs or by what a command ended up doing. That sometimes meant that everything I made was useless. Another issue is that a solution rarely felt satisfying to watch. For me, a big chunk of enjoyment from these type of games comes from seeing how smoothly everything does what it's supposed to do. But here it’s a guy carrying boxes, running from one pile to the next, leaving a mess behind and it’s hard to follow what he is doing. This is what normally makes me want to go back to optimize my solution. It's not bad but I think there are better options if you like this type of game.

I've always loved the style of Tomorrow Corporation's games, especially in Little Inferno, and this one continues the trend. Human Resource Machine is a fun little puzzle game where you use a limited amount of programming tools to complete simple tasks. Even though the tasks remain relatively simple, the toolkit provided makes them pretty complex - and that's where the fun comes in. While I liked the game's style and the puzzles tickled my brain, some things could have been handled better. The window for the program gets progressively harder to read as the jump commands and their destinations end up taking most of the space. You can copy and paste code, but you can only copy the entire program and paste over the entire program, so it's often easier to rewrite it. Here are two tips so you don't have to be frustrated like me: use comments for easier program navigation; and start each complex puzzle by using a simpler program as a base. Apart from those minor complaints and the unpolished story presentation, I still had a fun 5 hours with this game (as someone with minor programming experience) and recommend it to anyone looking for some casual fun .

This is a programming game in which you are given a problem and input data and are expected to construct a program using instructions that will solve the problem. The programming is cleverly disguised as instructions that a human instruction follower does. The game starts simply enough and the difficulty ramps up, eventually having to solve known computer science problems. The game can be played with the aim to simply solve the problems and advance the story or trying to reach (or sometimes exceed) certain efficiency criteria set by the game designers. Moreover, the interface is simple enough and well explained so that can be used by anyone and some of the problems are used to explain some of the capabilities that are added as the game progresses. The idea of a "human instruction follower" almost eliminates most of the shock usually associated with computers and mathematics. This makes the game (at least in the initial levels) a great educational tool for explaining how computers and programming work. Definitely one of the best games available in GOG, from the guys that made world of goo.

Nice game for people who like programming.