The Signal State

Great for puzzle-heads, rather on the difficult side, but really interesting. Quite unforgiving also, it does not have an Undo or anything like that, so it's more realistic: if you mess up, you must rewire the whole thing by hand.

In the years since I played this game, I never did come back and review it. That's on me. If you let this game pass you up, then that's on you. This game is great fun. There are so many puzzles and each one has many solutions. It's a great way to get creative and give yourself a mental workout at the same time. I just wish there was more!

bad translation, bad instructions

IIi

cool

(no spoilers in review) This game is... shall we say... "heavily inspired" by Shenzhen I/O. Quite a few things are maybe too on-the-nose, from the music to the conversations. That said, its hook is different enough that this is worth playing. Shenzhen I/O, despite being "board design" and somewhat mixed signal still relies heavily on writing firmware. There's none of that here, it's a lot more on the analog side of mixed-signal design and has some interesting hardware that works totally differently. There are some minor annoyances, the dialog/plot is too intrusive and isn't smart enough to realize that you're leading it into loops so if you choose some of the more interesting options you might repeat some lines. You also may force yourself to redo dialog if you continue the game to a problem you haven't solved (I think this is avoidable by going to the level select directly, but I don't always remember to do that). The biggest thing I think that's lacking is that in Shenzhen (and other Zachtronics games) you often have to choose a different solution because the most obvious one is somehow precluded by limited resources. You can't fit all your code into one microcon…