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Exapunks ring all pagers at once12/25/2023 ![]() ![]() In Shenzen I/O (and I assume in TIS-100 as well), the different puzzle loops would include different variables and input/output conditions, to make sure you didn’t just hard-code in the correct solution. In Spacechem and Opus Magnum, this was mostly done to make sure you could deal with spatial repetition. It’s always been a hallmark of Zachtronics games that you don’t just run your solution once, you run it several times in a row, to see if you actually solved ‘the puzzle’ instead of hyper-optimizing for the first set of starting circumstances. But the second element of the three, and the one that I think the most gives EXAPUNKS its unique flavor, is the element of uncertainty. If this was everything there was to EXAPUNKS, we’d already have a tidy set of possible challenges. Surely coordinating the message-sending behaviour of nine individual EXAs in a single block of code should be *easy*. How can you be sure that the right EXA reads the right value? Maybe if we put this one in Local mode, and that one… Or maybe one EXA is waiting to receive a particular confirmation value, but then two hosts over, two other EXAs are trying to quickly exchange register information. And if that sounds needlessly complicated to you, consider this: If two EXAs are trying to transmit different M values to the same recipient, the order in which those values are received is (again) determined randomly. That are also in ‘Local’ mode, because the two modes are incompatible. But while EXAs in ‘Global’ mode can communicate with any other EXA that it can track a network link to, EXAs in ‘Local’ mode can only communicate with other EXAs in the same host. One EXA can copy a value into their M register, which basically turns them into a broadcaster: It’ll be stuck holding that value until another EXA tries to read from their M register, at which point a transfer takes place and both EXAs can go on with their lives. I wasn’t 100% sure if that’s how it worked, so I whipped up this quick ‘solution’ to test things.ĮXAs can also communicate, in a limited sense, and that communication can be influenced by respective location as well. Files and hardware registers take up squares of space on the computers they’re on, and hosts and links are traversed by EXAs, the aforeshown code-executing robot friends. EXAPUNKS visualizes connected computers in a network as a flat physical space, almost akin to a tabletop RPG dungeon: Rectangular ‘rooms’ made of squares (representing different ‘host’ computers) connected by ‘doorway’ links (representing the connections between those hosts). The element of spatiality is core to EXAPUNKS‘s unique spin on hacking, taking it beyond ‘just’ executing code on a computer. EXAPUNKS‘s unique game identity is themed on three concepts: Spatiality, uncertainty, and finiteness. Rather, I’ll say that EXAPUNKS gets most of its Zachtronics DNA from Shenzen I/O - but then takes it into new and interesting places, where a static circuit board design theme couldn’t go. Shenzen I/O is still a unique and interestingly distinct game from EXAPUNKS - researching it and re-reading my own work for this article has made me want to reinstall it and give it another crack. Their games never build on each other directly, just conceptually and (to some degree) mechanically. I’m hesitant to call EXAPUNKS a ‘sequel’ or ‘follow-up’ to Shenzen I/O, or anything like that, because that’s not really how Zachtronics games work. You in a very real sense get something to look forward to in this game. Both games focus on a combination of pseudo-code programming and physical object placement/location, and both games use that setup to play in real-world space: Shenzen I/O had its big red binder manual, EXAPUNKS But if you are familiar with the corpus, I’ll quickly say this: EXAPUNKS feels more than anything else like a follow-up to Shenzen I/O, Zachtronics’ game about Assembly coding and circuit board placement. I said I didn’t want this review to just be more references to old Zachtronics games, and it won’t be. ![]() But is this a good thing or a bad thing? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer is ‘no’. Neither of those things happened with EXAPUNKS. This is ‘interesting’ in the sense that this doesn’t generally happen for me with Zachtronics games: I either run into a puzzle wall my brain can’t clear, or (more commonly) get so stuck on optimizing the early puzzles to beat all my friends that I burn through my enthusiasm before getting to the end. Cleared all the puzzles up to and including the last one, saw the story move to its (wild) conclusion, watched the credits, the whole nine yards. It turns out that I did, in fact, get to hacking them all.Īn interesting thing happened while playing EXAPUNKS: I beat it. ![]()
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