One More Go

After an hour of designing a process, inching it forward step by step, untangling all of the faults and bugs, my solution is finally running from start to finish. A triumph, but one that is short lived. My success is immediately followed by a screen that benchmarks my answer against those of all other users, quickly revealing that my solution is in no way efficient. If it were a marathon, it’d be crawling over the line days after the end of the event. Back to the editor then, to figure out just how others are getting to their answer so quickly.

If this sounds like a familiar process, then chances are you’ve played a Zachlike. Zachlikes are puzzle games where the solution is open ended, solved by designing complicated sequences of instructions and then hitting play to see whether you’ve accounted for everything or if the whole solution is just a tangled mess that needs to be unpicked and debugged. The genre has been defined by Zachtronics (hence the name), the developers responsible for Infinifactory, and more recently Last Call BBS.

The first Zachtronics game I played was SpaceChem. As I was studying chemistry at the time of its release, I was able to convince myself that it was somehow contributing to my education. In fact, through its drag and drop interface and its web-like pathways, I was actually learning the fundamentals of programming. Designing a process that follows a set of looping instructions turning single elements into multi-component molecules. SpaceChem is probably one of the more straightforward Zachlikes in that all of the elements needed to solve each puzzle exists on the screen, you just need to drag and drop those elements into a sequence that makes sense. Some of the more complicated Zachlikes allow you to infuse those elements with a fictional coding language, allowing for even more complex open ended solutions.

Exapunks is one such game, and is my favourite Zachlike. You play a hacker from the 90s who’s been infected with the “phage”, hacking banks to pay for medicine, and hacking your own body to manage the symptoms. Within the world of Exapunks, Exas are ubiquitous programs that permeate all forms of technology, meaning that the challenges range from amending pizza order systems, to dispensing money out of ATMs.

What makes this game stand out to me against some of the other Zachlikes I’ve played are the ways in which you feel connected to the world of Exapunks. There are a number of other hobbyist hackers that exist in the world of Exapunks, your interactions with them are limited to watching them converse in a chat box that sits in the bottom right of your screen. They comment on how the world is changed by each puzzle you have solved, and also share tips with one another, none more significant than the in-game zines they create. These act as the game’s tutorial system, teaching you the fundamentals of controlling the Exas, but also peppering plenty of narrative and set dressing that gives each of your missions added context. The zines can be printed and having them as physical objects scattered over your desk is a really neat way of getting you to role play as a hacker, with physical totems to write over and throw away when the frustration becomes too much. The tutorial sections themselves are a little vague, and it can be easy to misread or misunderstand portions of the zine, but that only adds to the feeling that you’re learning to harness a new technology. You’ll complete several challenges having limited yourself in some way because you misread an instruction, discovering much later all those tasks that seemed so complicated probably didn’t need to be. As you learn more, you’re better equipped, not only for solving more complicated tasks, but also for reaching back to those earlier puzzles and refining your approach.

Exapunks, like most Zachlikes, is absolutely stuffed to bursting. When you’re done puzzling there’s also an in-world GameBoy rip off that you can build custom games for, a way of developing your own puzzles in javascript and sharing them back to the Steam Workshop for other players to solve, and even a novel version of solitaire for when you need to look at a different kind of puzzle.

If any of that sounds appealing, then you really should take a look at Exapunks and the wider Zachtronics library. Exapunks is the one that speaks most to me, but they have so many variations of this type of game that there is almost certainly a Zachlike for everyone.