Sam & MaRU

A charming little game where you program your worker-bot to complete mundane tasks - uncover a sinister plot - and get in over your head engaging in corporate espionage! The levels lacked any leaderboards - so there's less of an incentive to optimise everything like you often get in this genre - so not a huge amount of replay value; but I was a big fan of the easter eggs, with extra scraps of story hidden off the main track. It's also good at teaching you the mechanics; introducing them slowly - so by the end combining them into a complex program becomes second nature... I mean very good at that; someone has obviously put a lot of thought into doing that. I did run into a few bugs... perhaps not surprising for an ambitious programming game by a solo developer, but nothing major. There's also a few quality of life things which similar games sometimes have and I missed... things like pausing code/ fast forwarding code mid-execution (debugging got a bit tedious on the longer levels); and being able to copy and paste code snippets from the help files... Regardless - I had fun with it; you might too.

This is one of the best coding games out there for beginners. While Zactronics is the best for pro devs, this game is the best third or fourth game to play if you have zero coding experience. Sam & MarRU is on par with Apple Swift Playgrounds in quality and coverage of coding concepts. If you want to learn how to code, this has to be on your playlist. ----- Update: I finished the game and created a walkthrough guide. The difficulty curve is skewed right--sharp incline from start then peaks near mid game, at "Hack Employee Database" and then finally long tail drops.

[b]The premise:[/b] It's a Zach-Like programming puzzle game where you write code to move robots around a 2D grid and perform tasks. If that sounds like your thing (and it certainly sounded like mine!), you'll probably like this one. The most well-known and obvious game to compare it to is [i]7 Billion Humans[/i], but to me it feels much more heavily influenced (in both gameplay and story, and art style for that matter) by [i]Marvellous, Inc.[/i]. It is different enough from both of those to qualify as its own thing, though. [b]The Gameplay:[/b] Like with most games in the "2D grid" sub-sub-genre of Zach-Likes, the puzzles are (usually) less about the code syntax and more about navigation, and specifically about what (and how much) information your program is able to gather about the space it's traversing. The programming in this game is much more flexible than in most games like it. The aforementioned commands about navigation and information gathering are powerful, and the programming language itself is much closer to BASIC than to assembly code (you can declare and call as many variables as you want, do multiple math operations in-line, and joint conditionals and loops are …

The best way to summarize this is a Zachtronics game without the polish. It's still worth your money though.