Playing A Game Silicon Zeroes PC

Silicon Zeroes started out pretty simple, as I saw in the demo; and these humble beginnings had me looking forward to more complex algorithmic puzzles in the later game.

Unfortunately, the later puzzles tend to feel more like riddles: solving an otherwise-straightforward problem without using a crucial component, or in a time limit that requires otherwise-counterproductive pipelining. It's even worse than TIS-100, whose limitations were at least consistent within the world of the game; in Silicon Zeroes, a component will be given to you in one puzzle, then taken away in another.

One particularly frustrating aspect of the game's mechanics is how it treats floating or undefined values. In digital electronics, an undefined voltage level is never useful; but in many of Silicon Zeroes' puzzles, an undefined input gets used as a behavioral switch, effectively disabling a component's output. And this mechanic is a critical part of many puzzles' solutions.

This interacts especially poorly with the game's timing system. Clock ticks and component-specific "mTick" delays appear to be meant as a simulation of actual CPU pipelining; and while you'd imagine that specific parts of the pipeline would be active or inactive based on preceding input, the game doesn't really offer those conditional tools, except as a side-effect of undefined input.

It feels janky. And weird.

I don't want to overplay my frustrations with the game, because I did have some fun with it, especially in the early and simple puzzles. It just felt like, as the puzzles became more complicated, their ambitions outstripped the game's mechanical capabilities.

The dull story didn't help, either. (I'd recommend the first season of Halt and Catch Fire, instead.)

Silicon Zeroes is somewhat short, unless you want to do the extra post-campaign puzzles -- which I didn't. Longer than Human Resource Machine, if not by much. By the time I saw the "ending" cinematic, I was very ready to stop playing, despite how many more puzzles I have left.

Better than: Prelogate
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, Opus Magnum
Instead of outshining Opus Magnum: Silicon Zeroes ended up reminding me that Zachtronics, even at its worst, is still pretty good.

Progress: Finished board 3.

Rating: Meh