TIS-100 - Inaccessible, brilliant

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TIS-100 - Inaccessible, brilliant

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TIS-100 by Zachtronics is one of the most challenging and intrinsically rewarding games I have played. It has a cool, vibey feel and is packed with brain teasers that will keep you staring at your computer screen for hours. It will have you pulling out paper, sketching flow charts, and working through simple programming puzzles. It’s a programming and logic puzzle game with a light story that never really takes center stage; instead, the game is all about challenging you as you focus for hours on end. The puzzles are very similar to exercises you might find in a beginner coding course, which means this game appeals to a small niche of people. I'm glad it exists, but I’m also surprised someone took the time to develop it at all! As someone who enjoys coding, I found the game extremely addictive. The puzzles were challenging and reminded me why I wanted to pursue computer science back when I went to university (before realizing I couldn't pass the math courses). I always felt a great sense of satisfaction whenever I finally found the solution and saw the puzzle completion screen. It made me feel like I was a genius! The puzzles themselves are a 10 / 10 affair. However, the story side of things is where the game is weakest. Accessibility is also one of this game's downfalls. Ironically, programming in TIS-100 is more difficult than any real-life example most people will work on. The game is also uninterested in helping you solve the puzzles. While the difficulty increases gradually and introduces new concepts over time, I would not say the game ever teaches you anything. It expects you to bring a lot of programming knowledge to the table, and it assumes you have done similar puzzles before. It wants you to see this as an interesting twist on problems that are very familiar to anyone who has dabbled in basic computer science concepts. All this makes TIS-100 unapproachable, which is unfortunate for such a brilliant game. Opening Vibe When you launch the game, your screen turns into a 1970s terminal with all the humming and noise of that bygone era. You will feel immediately out of your element. It invokes an overwhelming feeling, familiar to anyone who rarely opens the CMD terminal on their Mac or PC, or has tried to use Linux for the first time. A recognition that, despite the simplicity of this text-only interface, there is a great deal of power and complexity lying below the surface. Far more than the hand-holding visual interfaces we are mostly familiar with. At this point, the game does something truly novel: it gives you a user manual! This, for me, is the game's true brilliance. There is an attempt to fully emulate the experience of using these ancient computers, with paper manuals and hand-scribbled notes. This simple tool brought a level of immersion that I was not expecting. And elevated the game in that moment. You will quickly scroll through the manual and be overwhelmed again. There are some descriptions of how the TIS-100 computer system works and the simple commands at your disposal. Text highlighted by the protagonist's uncle Randy when he first found this computer hints towards solutions for future puzzles. The vibe at the start of the game is perfection. Which is critical. It solves a key issue this game has: how do you tell a story through computer coding, without ever breaking the illusion that you are using a 50-year-old computer? Through this manual and some very short snippets of dialogue hidden throughout the game, a mystery starts to open up. Why does this computer exist? What secret lurks behind that black and white text? What does solving these puzzles achieve? You will, of course, discover some of these mysteries, but ultimately, I found the story to be rather weak. It never moved passed being set dressing for the puzzles. A bit of salt to make the gameplay more palpable. The game ultimately fails to live up to the opening vibe. Any hints to what may be lurking below the surface of the interface are red herrings. I would have liked to see more depth, perhaps finding more ARG elements sprinkled in; things like finding more PDFs or any sort of secrets. While there are a few easter eggs, there is no real secret lurking beneath the TIS-100. Instead, there is just a feeling and vibe. While I enjoyed this experience, it feels to me like a missed opportunity. It would elevate this game from merely a coding puzzle game to indie-gaming greatness. The kind of creativity and novel storytelling that only pops up occasionally. Gameplay As I have mentioned, the puzzles take the form of simple programming exercises. Mostly, number sorting. The screen consists of a grid of boxes. One of these boxes is the input, and a number will appear in this box. You have a handful of commands to move and manipulate this number across the grid to an output box. Your goal is to move the numbers towards the output box in the correct order. Simple enough! Using the commands you have, you can move...

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