SHENZHEN I/O

This game teaches proper reading of manuals and coding. It is very realistic. The limited program memory of some of the simulated devices fosters the building of software optimisation skills. I recommend this game

One of a kind game, that's easy to get into, the low level coding language is not that complex. Improving your designs efficiency is the challenge of this game. It does have some educational value. Love it. +++ recommend it to anyone into coding and/or puzzle games! :-)

This is a logic puzzler with a theme of electronics and assembly language. It is not an educational game, not realistic, not teaching assembly, electronics etc. If you have fun, exploring how things work (even looking into the manual), and not just finding a solution, but optimizing it, if you can focus for long time, if you have a programming background and dont mind some lack of realism (like no binary operations but operations on decimal digits), this is the game for you. The puzzle design is excellent, but if you like clean elegant designs, it will sometimes be frustrating, because you have very limited means and do deal with that, you need to use some ugly tricks, like connecting different things to the same pin, reading from address pointer, write wrong output and then just overwrite it, etc.. The puzzles are built in a way that it is challenging to find a good solution and there are often some extras that prevent a nice and straight forward design. Despite you have logic gates and even a pga, this is less useful for the puzzles, most often it is about connecting small controllers and using tricks in their assembly code, the game leaves some potential unused here. It is quite polished but I still miss some QOL features. Font in the user interface is unneccessarily too small. Sandbox and being able to create own puzzles is nice, modding support would be even better. Compared to Human Resource Machine which I also did play, for me Shenzhen IO is more difficult and less educational.

For a coding addicted like me, it is a great game, maybe a bit repetitive. The feeling is different that the usual and the challenges feel somewhat "real tasks". I was pleasantly surpriset by the manual that simulate a bunch of datasheet for the devices, unclear and feeling incomplete like a real cheap hardware datasheet is

Fun but difficult especially if you are new to compsci.