The game takes about 2 minutes to load on my mac (Big Sur, 16" 2020 model, i9, 32gb ram). Once everything loaded, I changed the game to window mode but cannot move the window around. It also seems pretty sluggish, but I haven't even gotten into the gameplay yet. I'll tweak my review once this is working properly, hopefully this is just a launch issue and gets fixed quickly.
Great game, but needs a Mac build.
I'm a developer myself and brainstormed an idea similar to this game a couple years ago. After discovering this game, I completely threw out my idea and just reveled in how amazing Exa Punks is. If you ever wanted the sense that you are a hacker doing hackery things and are part of some elite underground culture (but operating out of your bedroom), this is the game for you. This game teleports be back to when I used to watch X-Files religiously. Where this game really excels is in the puzzle solving mechanics. The puzzles are fantastic and have a great backstory. They are deceptively hard and require that you read the Zines obsessively. The visual presentation of each puzzle is gorgeous. The debugging system is super easy to use and very intuitive. Finally, identifying the little clues are crucial to solving the problem. May times I over-thought the solution, whereas if I just read the instructions more carefully, I would have solved it much sooner. This is my favorite Zachtronics game so it easily gets a 10/10. I would only recommend this to people that like complex problem solving. I hesitate to call it a programming game because no programming/math experience/skills are needed. It just feels like programming without all of the pendantic, boring stuff.
I own this on Steam. I've been playing it for quite a while so I've seen much of this game's evolution. Couple things of note... the game is extremely polished, there's a complete game here that is very fun to play and worth the cost of admission. The devs have been very good at maintaing stability between releases... they've had some issues with Mac builds, but take those issues very seriously and get them resolved quickly. There are no missing game play mechanics that make this game frustrating to play. Despite the fact that this game is very complete and feature rich, the devs keep improving it and tweaking the balancing. They have a youtube channel were they give frequent updates so there is a lot of visibility into what they are doing- it's early access done right. I would recommend watching some youtube game play videos to ramp up... gameplay is similar to FTL, but definitely tailored very well to this game's setting. Visually, I think the game is stunning, but you may not appreciate the pixel art (some of which is still placeholder).
