A=B

Who thought that you could turn the UNIX "sed" command into a game? Only advisable to even attempt to play if you're a programmer or similar logical mind, but a fun little string substitution game where you use simple repeated string substitution to form a programming language to solve puzzles. A bit like a TIS-100 kind of thing.

As a game, it's pretty decent. It does its job: you get a bunch of programming puzzles, write a program to solve each one. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have any sort of histograms or anything to compare with other players. Each level does come with a built-in line count challenge, but that's all, there's nothing to encourage you to optimize it further beyond that as you cannot compare and compete against your friends (other than doing so manually). Its theory is awesome though. I'm a computer theorist, in the field of theory of computation and complexity, so esoteric languages (esolangs) like this are a big draw to me. It's impressive how this esolang, with only one kind of instruction, is Turing-complete. Analyzing the theory is a lot of fun, including proving that it is Turing-complete. And the story of the game includes the designer coming up with exactly this theory. Also, apparently Zachtronics has left the mark in that every programming game needs some sort of a side card game. You get one here, it's quite different (more a tableau builder) than most. It has no fancy graphics, but that tracks with a developer name like "Artless Games". But if you just want pure game co…

Delightful little "game" (more of a programming/math puzzle). Might not be very accessible if you don't have experience with programming and a little computer science theory (understanding Turing machines or equivalent is helpful). Clearly inspired by Zachtronics games. The difficulty isn't too bad until around the back part of chapter 5 (unless you're trying to meet all the challenge line counts; I had to consult others' ideas on a few of those). 5-5 and 5-6 seemed a bit much, especially with the time limit and string length restrictions, although [spoiler] apparently you can do every level in the game in 10 lines or less [/spoiler] so maybe I wasn't going about them in the right way. I enjoyed how some of the challenges at first seem quite difficult or impossible until you have a key insight, which often unlocks a new world of possibilities. The reveal at the end that [spoiler] none of the keywords were necessary [/spoiler] was something I suspected early on, but nice to confirm it.

Good esolang, different enough from regular programming that the problems are challenging, but not so limited that it becomes overly tedious.

one of the best programming games. tiny language and great puzzles

Another great puzzle game that makes you feel stupid while you solve puzzles using an esolang programming system.