EXAPUNKS

King of Posters
#1

The new Zachtonics game, EXAPUNKS, hit Early Access today, and I spent like 2 hours playing it today. It seems somewhat similar to SHENZEN I/O, but a little more gradual on the learning curve, and with external printed stuff that is a bit more helpful, so I am enjoying it more to start with. The gimmick in this one are little virtual bots called EXAs that you use to manipulate files and data and such.

The story in this one so far is pretty fucking dark. Your main character has a disease called The Phage, and treatment for it runs about 700 dollars a day, or as your creepy AI buddy informs you, one hack=one dose. So you get to hacking. And it gets to dosing. Pretty early on, you hack your own nervous system so that your left arm will receive the proper signals, leaving EXAs running in your body forever. The game has an early bit making fun of the Gig Economy. There is a running IRC of the other EXAPUNKS talking about the world on the mission screen.

So yeah, I am ready for this to suck down my brain for awhile. Anyone else on this?

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#2

that’s a good sell

how early access are we talking?

1 Like
#3

Zachtronics games in the past have entered Early Access in a state most other devs would consider complete/launch ready. I assume the whole campaign is finished and EA will mainly be used to see if any balance issues or awkward IU bits snuck through. Upon final release (usually within 1-2 months) they will likely add in either an additional campaign or some bonus missions, in addition to whatever most likely minor fixes they decide upon due to EA.

I basically recommend never playing an early access game, but Zachtronics are probably the safest/most complete when they come to it.

3 Likes
#4

Yeah @username covered it pretty well. It is full and complete, but they may tweak some minor performance stuff and possibly add some post-game puzzles (this is what they did with Opus Magnum, their last big release). The plot, per Zachtronics, is done and complete though.

The game also comes with some zines (that you can buy physical version of, or print out for yourself) that are actually even part of the plot so far. One relatively early mission had me hacking into the company that printed them off to make them look like the guy who wrote the zine already paid for it. It’s good stuff and I appreciate that Zachtronics is doing a good job of trying to make physical parts of games more of a thing.

#5

Ya’ll playing this should friend me on Steam if we aren’t already, so we can get a little competition in the highscore tables (half the fun w/ these games is optimizing!) https://steamcommunity.com/id/gate88/

And yeah, I feel like Zachtronics games are getting more polished with each iteration. This one seems to have some voice acting, and it’s not bad at all!

I think I like the mechanics of this one a lot, even compared to his other programming games. There’s some really neat stuff you can do.

#6

I made it to Issue 2 of the Zine.
This game just keeps being fun and feeling awesome.

1 Like
#7

There’s good variety in this game!

The levels in which you’re hacking your body feel pretty different from the corporate hacking levels. There are also hacker battles, which are kind of like the bosses in SpaceChem (thematically) but way less of a difficulty spike and a nice change of pace.

There’s even more than 1 side activity.

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#8

So what the hell is SWIZ and how does that work? The zine’s explanation makes no sense to me.

#9

I saw a hint about using it online for one puzzle and I got it to work, but I am still not totally sure I get how it worked.

#10

SWIZ, for swizzle, allows you to isolate and/or reorder digits from a value, counting from the right. Like, if you have the value 520, SWIZ 520 3 X will put 5 in X, SWIZ 520 32 X will put 52 in X, SWIZ 520 123 X will put 025 in X. Useful for some storage systems where a single number indicates several things (like the first digit is host and the next two are file number or whatever) or in case where you have to enter a number as its component digits.

Took me 2 nights and a half to finish the game. That puts it between Opus Magnum (1 night) and Shenzhen IO (not finished) difficulty-wise. The last few levels are brutal, and the final one was a real headscratcher -although I found a valid approach early on, fitting it into the allowed size was a real challenge. In general the main difficulty is to find how to synchronize a number of EXAs even though you kinda lack the tools to do so. I quite liked it, and of course I spent today going back to previous levels and optimizing them. if you want to optimize for cycles, in some cases it’ll be shaving off and simplifying instructions, but for larger cycle counts you’ll find parallelism is the way to go.

One really handy undocumented trick I only realized on the final puzzle:

you can write and read the T register just like X! It’ll get overwritten when you call TEST though. So as long as you haven’t got to test something a single exa can store two values without any extra storage. Also since a value of 0 means false and anything else means true you can shorten some loops. Like,
COPY 10 T
MARK LOOP
do some stuff
SUBI T 1 T
TJMP LOOP
is the same as
COPY 10 X
MARK LOOP
do some stuff
SUBI X 1 X
CHECK X = 0
FJMP LOOP
only shorter and faster and now X is free for whatever you may need to do with it

Oh, and absolutely read the zines for lots of interesting details on the setting. Like, the Phage is even more messed up once you realize what it’s doing to you and why you can delays its effects using programming. I also love that there’s little bits of irrelevant stuff and extra controls in most levels that you can read or mess up.

Perhaps my only very small disappointment was the ending reminded me of another game that’s done it better, but it was still pretty good.

#11

Oh shit, OK, that makes more sense on SWIZ, yeah.

Yeah, that was some kinda messed up stuff. The world in this game is really nicely filled out.

#12

+1 on this.
I got into zachtronics with spacechem, on a humble bundle. I picked up early access on every game they released on that format, they always delivered.

This is probably the greatest thing ever.

Im stuck on US Government and I have a tip for you all. Dont assume the tests dont walk around each edge case.

Also i dont think the “kill” command targets are random at all. Everytime I tryed to do 3 or 4 kill commands at the same cycle, all the exas targeted their buddies, not the enemies.

1 Like
#13

IIRC the zine mentions kill commands will prioritize friendly exas. They’re random outside of that.

1 Like
#14

Oh, forgot to read that. Finally got Us Government down.

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#15