Marble Computing

A unique puzzle that's well worth the cost of just $0.99

I wish I had never bought it. I see what it aims for and kind of like the idea, but the resulting ruleset is poorly explained and painful to reason about. I got the most unfun puzzle experience I had in long, long time.

Marble Computing is a tiny game in which you lay tracks for marbles and solve logic puzzles. Though its aesthetics are somewhat bland, the game hyper-focuses on one aspect: creating engaging computer-related puzzles. A few of these are quite interesting—mixing a 3-bit adder and an XOR gate with the physicality of marbles going around tracks is fun and makes you think about those problems in unique ways. The physicality is really what shines here: you have very limited space, marbles bump into one another if you place tiles haphazardly, and conditionals and synchronization are purposefully cumbersome. Simple elements, like XOR gates, become quite complicated yet manage to avoid being overwhelming. This is aided by the fact that there’s usually a few levels you can tackle in any order, so you’re never really stuck on any sections. You know a game is good when its negatives seem more like items on a wishlist rather than true drawbacks. All of these are work-aroundable, but also annoying and worth mentioning. This is one of those games that deserves that extra polish. A worse—or longer—game would’ve had me really complaining about this stuff, but not here. Here’s the wishlist: Featu…

Mechanics are a little too fiddily, but that would be fine if any of the 3 color options helped me see which order to put these in. There are two levels that block progression where the entire puzzle is order the 8 and 12 colors in order and I couldn't get past them because the order they come out isn't clear either. I assume it's right to left top to bottom like reading but by not being able to see the color I just didn't really feel like continuing.

Very very good

Have currently finished all but the last two or three levels (still working on those). There's some polish this could use - On the simpler side, I wish it would save working solutions so if you try to optimize later and mess it up, you can restore your last working solution. On the more complex side, it would also be nice if this had zachtronics-style histograms. That said, the game still feels pretty good and I'd say it's definitely worth it, especially given the price point. Some of the reviews mention few puzzles, but I believe more were added in 2022. The later ones are extra hard (like binary addition) and will require quite a bit of thinking, even if you already know exactly how binary addition works in a non-marble-based-world. Also a tip: On Principle 6: When the game says right click, you have to right click a node and then drag it onto the junction. This wasn't intuitively explained so I couldn't quite figure it out until rewatching the game trailer.