this reminds me of earlier zachtronics games where it was up to the player to map real-world computing/circuit concepts to the primitive tools the game gave you rather than having an explicit component for branching or logical operators. i always enjoyed this style more, because you get to invent/discover the building blocks more organically, and then use them to solve harder problems. being able to interact with different layers of abstraction without the interface having to change is nice. lots of little tactical choices to make in addition to the large engineering problem you’re solving.
also since instructions and data are both “blocks” here, it has the potential for some very interesting self-modifying machines.