Where Human Resource Machine teaches basic programming, 7 Billion Humans teaches basic multithreaded programming. The puzzles are still fairly well thought out, where easy to explain goals become challenging and rewarding to encode as algorithms. The cutscenes are even better than Human Resource Machine, and can even be skipped if you aren't into them. But the actual design seems far less coherent than I had hoped. Some the instructions you can give your workers are simple (listening for a signal, picking up a box in a certain direction, taking a single step), others are extremely complex ideas put into a single magic operation (Pick up the nearest box, give box to the nearest shredder, find the nearest worker). I wish all the instructions were simple building blocks, or that they all were high-level. There are situations where a high-level instruction does almost (but not quite) what you want (find the nearest box larger than the one I am standing over), and now you must essentially re-implementing what was before a single instruction. You also do not have access to all instructions in all later assignments. I guess that in some ways this represents different requirements, but it makes me wish that these were branching assignment paths, and not all in the same line of required assignments. I wish the puzzles were simply more carefully designed to make those omitted instructions less useful instead of just hiding them. The debugger can also become quite cumbersome. In HRM you could rewind one step, but in this game you cannot. If you step once too far, or only notice a certain situation after it has occurred, you cannot rewind to see how it happened. You must instead start over and watch how it occurred. It is also a major issue that you can't always click on a worker to see their state if a worker with a thought bubble is directly in front.
