Human Resource Machine
For the PC
Played using Mouse
Overall Rating: C
Human Resource Machine is a puzzle game – or more accurately, a programming game. You are given a very limited set of coding instructions which expand over the course of the game, and your goal is to solve all of the puzzles within a certain number of instructions or a certain number of lines executed. You have some basic looping commands (basically, GOTO and GOTO IF 0 and GOTO IF < 0), addition and subtraction, variables, pointers, and comments.
The goal is basically to take inputs and output according to the instructions. There are 41 levels in all.
There… honestly is little to be said about this game. It is pretty much a pure programming game, and while it might be an interesting puzzle for a lot of folks to solve, on the other hand, I feel like if you didn’t understand programming, a lot of this game would be very inaccessible, despite its supposedly easy interface. Writing programs in it is a process of click and drag, there’s no real ability to create subroutines, and sometimes it can feel a bit tedious when you realize you’ve barely exceeded the necessary parameters and are going to have to take an entirely new approach.
Honestly, if you’re going to spend six hours messing around with programming, you might as well spend that time messing around with a real programming language. The story here is at best vague and at worst obtuse and self-contradictory; are you working for robots? Are you a robot yourself? Who knows, and who cares? The whole thing ends up feeling rather pointless in the end.
2.0