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.
