Exapunks (2018)

EXAPUNKS is a tricky game to get ahold of (especially if you're not proficient with assembly!) but there's a lot to learn about this neat lil' system and has a great story to help make the tough puzzles rewarding.

Taking place in an alternate 1997, the player is a hacker who has been affected by a mysterious mechanical plague. Given missions by a mysterious AI, the player hacks over dozens of missions as they fight their disease and learn more about said mysterious AI.

The cyberpunk flair and visuals really help add life to what is essentially a series of programming puzzles - each mission requires that the player codes a solution in the in-game assembly language, which supports file reading/writing, basic math, and manipulation of one or more threads of execution represented by little robots named EXAs that travel across host locations in order to execute tasks. The player can even use a special register to send messages and have EXAs wait to help establish some concurrency.

The tough part is figuring out what to do with very little register space (one general purpose, one test register, an unwieldly file, and the message register) and the game's strict code size limits. That said, learning more about the game's systems (through handy zine files provided by the game!) and trial/error debugging is very rewarding, and while things get complicated quickly there are handy functions for comments, stepping through functions, speeding to a program line, and even macros for repeating functions (if one wishes to unroll a loop). The more savvy programmers can compete on leaderboards for code size, execution cycles, and amount of concurrent EXA activity.

The music is pretty laid back in EXAPUNKS, vaguely futuristic sounding but relatively chill. The interface is slick and very readable, and the minimal EXA interface is counter-balanced with dark and cozy cyberpunk visuals, right on down to vaguely anime-esque character designs and quality voice acting.

EXAPUNKS might be a difficult game to recommend since things can get pretty difficult and most puzzles easily take an hour or more (for 50+ missions! And some FIENDISH bonus post-game missions) but it always feels like there's something to learn about the language and the world's EXA systems and that feeling is incredibly rewarding.

This game is a brilliant evolution of the programming puzzles introduced in the developer's earlier titles like TIS-100, which I played and loved around this time last year. I haven't played the dev's other titles, so I'll just be comparing these two to one another when needed.

While TIS-100 offered a totally barebones, old-school terminal style look, EXAPUNKS ratchets up the presentation in every way, with each level having an isometric view of a little robot who travels around interacting with physical hosts, modems, files, and more. Furthermore, each level (and the game as a whole) now has story around it involving hackers in a techno-disease-ridden alternate history 1997, with each level getting a unique visual theme and an extra bit of memorability and context.

Seeing this little robot guy move around, and watching file manipulation and other things in real-time is really clear and helpful. In the above level, for example, I'm tasked with overwriting a list of large payments to a specific user with smaller payments totaling the same amount. You can see all these different files you could access, their contents in real-time, as well as different hosts you could visit, security protocols, etc. and have to build your solution around that.

As you can imagine, there's a huge variety of ways you can solve puzzles like this, a fact that the game really leans into for its replayability factor. After each level, your code's performance is stacked up against other players in 3 core metrics to give some extra motivation on how to improve the solution.

Though the puzzles can be tough to crack, the invented programming language for the game is great. Programming for multiple little robot dudes at once also works really intuitively and is a lot of fun when it's needed. A few hours in, it felt very natural to use these systems without referring much to the included documentation.

Speaking of that documentation, it's one aspect of the game I'm a bit mixed on. Like in TIS-100, the programming language info is all put inside these PDF booklets that are meant to be either printed out or viewed on a second screen. It's a nice concept, especially here where there's a lot of story flavor mixed in too, but even once you have the language down, this game has you going back to the book again and again to learn levels' individual gimmicks. I think it becomes more of a hassle than a benefit to the game to have to refer to an outside source this often, and some kind of better tooltips and searchable index in-level would have been appreciated.

What that does mean, however, is that there can be a really notable variety between how levels actually work, since generally each one has that new gimmick for you to figure out, like hacking ATMs, or playing a video on live TV channels, or making some game console play games region-free. Some levels go even further off the expected path and place you in competition with another hacker to hold some objective, or have you rewire nerves in your own body, and crazy things like that. It's pretty awesome.

This is obviously an incredibly niche title, and it's easy to pass off its very high rating on the site as sort of a self-selecting audience, where only people who would love this game would even try it. To an extent that's probably true, but this game has some of the best puzzles I've seen anywhere with huge freedom on how to solve them, a nice clean presentation, and a focused programming language and toolkit that is enjoyable to use. As a bonus, you can even make your own levels or even make a game for a fictional game console. Just a very well-done package.

this is probably the best puzzle game ever made. I wonder if I can beat it without seeking assistance, it looks pretty long and some of these are taking several hours to solve. I am guessing its going to get cuckoo-crazy hard.

The amazing thing is you can program your own solutions and do things not necessarily intended. I look up the puzzles after I solve them and people find slightly to very different solutions. Never seen anything like it.