Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle

Cute idea, but does an exceptionally poor job of demonstrating the principles it's trying to teach and frequently leaves out tools that'd make things substantially easier in the name of faux replayability, resulting in a game best played while ignoring its unhelpful "helpful tips" and just looking at a regex command list on a 2nd monitor. Pity!

Sadly Im also agreeing with bad reviews here. Great potential. Fails to deliver the lesson before it gives you puzzle. Every regex rule should have one lesson and then it can also dive into some tricks to ease the work, but it is not doing much. The star system is badly implemented, it demotivates. while, similar to Zachtronics, its giving a graph, which would be on its own enough to hint that perhaps robust solution could be polished. Im so so sad this didnt work as I imagined it would.

Recommendation: Not Recommended I bought "Copy Editor" hoping to get better at practical, real-world Regex, but I have ended up incredibly frustrated by the game's artificial throttling. Instead of letting you solve text challenges using standard, elegant, and efficient Regex patterns, the game constantly locks basic syntax elements (like the * or ? quantifiers, or $1 backreferences in the replace field). While the developer likely intended this to create iterative "puzzles," the actual result is that it forces more knowledgeable developers to write four or five fragile, brute-force rules to do a job that a single, standard Regex rule would solve instantly. It doesn't teach you how to write good, efficient Regex—it teaches you how to write clumsy workarounds to satisfy an artificial game engine. If you want a puzzle game that very slowly iterates over logical puzzles using Regex characters as a skin, you might enjoy this. But if you are actually trying to learn practical Regex to use in your day-to-day work, this game will only slow you down, frustrate you and teach you bad habits.

The game instruction does not exist at all

A nice way or learning REGEX

Explicitly forbids you from using certain constructs until the game teaches them to you at a later time. Basically, you are forced to create a worse solution, instead of the just handing you the tools to create the best possible one.