A collection of smaller puzzle games that represent a final send-off for Zachtronics, giving the studio a chance to make good on a bunch of different ideas they'd had kicking around all in one go:
- 20th Century Food Court: An assembly-line building game where you create a set-up to automate the preparation of various fast food items. At first I thought this was going to be a lot like Infinifactory, but much of the challenge comes not from laying out your conveyor belts, but setting up the logic for control modules without losing track of where the hell all of your different crisscrossing wires are going (or simply running out of space for more modules). Also, its relationship to time is very funny to me: it's a game made in the 21st century, where the premise is that it was made in the 20th century, about people from the 27th century trying to make their own little recreation of the 20th century.
- STEED FORCE Hobby Studio: Less of a game, and more of a gunpla-assembling simulator. Cut the pieces out of their sprue tree1, snap them together, carefully spray paint your figure, and apply decals. You're not graded on how much you make it look like the picture on the box or anything, but I spent ages carefully applying masking tape with pixel-perfect placement so I could paint some small area of a piece without getting any outside of the lines. Just a really nice, chill time.
- X’BPGH: The Forbidden Path: Create fleshy abominations via cellular division rules (if there's space to your left, divide to your left; if you're a patch of skin and there's bone above you, grow some hairs, etc.) Easily my favorite of the bunch, both for the puzzles themselves and the weird, gross aesthetic.
- Sawayama Solitaire: The obligatory new Zachtronics solitaire variant—this one's basically just your standard Klondike solitaire, except all the starting cards are face-up and you can't reset and re-deal the rest of the deck. Don't have much to say about it, but it's a good time.
- Dungeons & Diagrams: A fantasy dungeon themed Picross variant where you don't get any grouping information, and instead have constraints around making single-width hallways ending in monsters and 3x3 spaces for "treasure rooms". Right up my alley as someone who's played a lot of Picross and Hexcells and the like.
- ChipWizard™ Professional: The final take on the Zachtronics programming game. This time around, it's integrated circuit design, building transistors, logic gates, flip-flop circuits, and so on, all the things I only half-remember from my computer architecture classes. This was definitely the one I had the hardest time getting my head around, especially when you factor in the tiny amount of circuit board space afforded to you, but it was really satisfying whenever I got something to work like I intended.
- HACK*MATCH: Arcade tile-matching puzzle game in in a similar vein to Bejeweled or Dr. Mario. This is actually a returning minigame from EXAPUNKS, but I still haven't played that one (or MOLEK-SYNTEZ, for that matter), so it was new to me. The only one in the collection I couldn't actually beat, because I have no practice with these kinds of games and because the final level is absolutely brutal, replacing every block on screen with garbage every so often.
- Kabufuda Solitaire: Yet another solitaire variant, although this one is a returning version from Eliza, in which you try to stack up matching sets of cards. Gets really tricky on the higher difficulties, when you have less free cells to work with.
I'm really going to miss Zachtronics, but thankfully I've still got a few of their titles left to play, and other developers have been carrying the torch of open-ended optimizable puzzle games with fantastic Zachlikes like Silicon Zeroes, Human Resource Machine, and 7 Billion Humans. I suppose I should be glad that the studio got to go out on its own terms, and end things on such a strong note.
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I don't actually know anything about Gunpla, I got this term from Wikipedia