I’ve by no means completely understood the attraction of video games that includes programming components. They ask you to enact one of many trickiest elements of growth, however with out rewarding you with a completed sport on the finish. Algo Bot – a brand new puzzler from the builders of horsey type-’em-up Epistory, which Pip loved a fair bit – options programming, however wraps it up in a lovely sci-fi world the place WALL-E-esque robots bicker in gleaming spaceship hallways. It’s out now on Steam for $eight.99/$6.47.
While Fishing Cactus’ Epistory requested you to sort like your life relied on it (it, er, did) to battle enemies and discover a fairly, papercraft fantasy world, Algo Bot is sport of symbols and rigorous puzzling as a substitute. In your try to forestall a colony ship from going tits-up and killing everybody on-board, you’ll enter sequences of instructions to a cute little helper bot, utilizing a visible programming language that one way or the other bypasses the necessity for lengthy strings of phrases. You do that by dragging symbols equivalent to ‘go forward’ or ‘pick up object’ onto a timeline on the backside of the display. The bot will then carry these orders out in sequence, revealing that you just’ve plonked ‘turn right’ down within the incorrect place and thus doomed humanity to an everlasting slumber.
My considerations about in-game programming apart, I do love the chunky, clear, and minimalist aesthetic they’re going for right here. I additionally recognize the gently mocking tone of the narrator bot, PAL, who seems to fall someplace between Marvin the Paranoid Android and GlaDOS.
Algo Bot’s received over 40 puzzles unfold out over 5 areas, so it feels like a reasonably hefty sport. As common, there’s a launch low cost in place, so if you wish to shave a couple of pennies off the asking value you’ll want to select this up earlier than February 21st.
