ProxOS

⠀

ProxOS is the kind of project that quietly sidesteps conventional expectations of what a “game” should be and instead presents itself as a self-contained computing environment disguised as one. Developed and published by slojanko, it places players inside a fictional operating system inspired by early personal computing, where the primary activity is not exploration, combat, or even puzzle-solving in the traditional sense, but programming. From the moment you begin, it becomes clear that this is less about playing in a world and more about understanding a system—one that invites curiosity, patience, and a willingness to engage with logic at a fundamental level. At its core, ProxOS revolves around writing code in a simplified, assembly-like language and executing it within a simulated machine. The experience is intentionally low-level, emphasizing how instructions are processed rather than abstracting them away. You interact with a basic editor, compile your code, and observe how it behaves within the constraints of the system. Success is not measured through flashy outcomes but through correctness and efficiency—getting a program to run as intended becomes its own reward. This des…

ProxOS is retro aesthetic zack-like coding problem puzzler. You are presented with an virtual computer with programming utilities to solve coding problems in assembly like language. The retro feel is masterfully done, reminding me of Comet 64 while the actual coding feels more like Zacktronics EXAPUNKS. ProxOS leans more into the simulation side and pseudo assembly is more detailed and thus more complex, e.g. the add command requires to specify data type-- addi for integer or addf for floating. The complexity is more taxing, requiring some effort to understand the assembly-like language before attempting to solve problems. I do not think that I would have understood this game without first playing EXAPUNKS because both games have terse documentation. The concise instructions does not work as well in ProsOS because the psuedo assembly language is more detailed. I am a beginner level programmer (I can make a a todo list app in JS) and I have to really think hard to understand the docs. Ultimately ProxOS is a well designed game and a clear labor of love. This is a programmer making a programming problem games for programmers. It's niche, complicated and exceptionally beauti…

‏‏‎ ‎

Cool game, I like programming in assembly, will probably make some more projects (idk maybe BF interpreter or some more games)

It's a rather open ended puzzle game that is fun to optimize in. There's the possibility to create custom puzzles once you run out and share on discord. I had one of my puzzles part of the game, so if you want to make puzzles for others to solve, there might be some space for you to do so. You get quite a lot of coding space to solve puzzles which without spoiling the reason why might be a bad thing. Programs don't live in memory in the sort of sense that you can write self modifying code. There is a stack, but it's also not part of the RAM but treated as a separate structure and storage by itself. Overall, the puzzles are decent, though I'd loved to see some more data-packed puzzles. A lot of the data to be read is in integer format which is the largest width to be read in one instruction meaning there is little room for arithmetic parallelism. Puzzles range from dead easy (tutorial level?) to quite tricky. At current writing, there is a puzzle that only 2 people have solved. I don't know if it's because of difficulty, interest or lack of players. I've enjoyed my stay here and I hope to make (and play) more puzzles in the future. The discord isn't very active, but the develop…