Luke Beeman

A short and excellent work of parser-based interactive fiction that doesn't really have any puzzles but nevertheless uses its medium to great effect. Really glad I took the spoiler warning in 50 Years of Text Games to heart and went in blind, because there are moments of comprehension and epiphany that were alternately thrilling and devastating, where a single seemingly innocuous line of narration was able to instill a sense of curious wonder or mounting dread (and in the latter case, trying to act on my sudden sense of urgency only let the game twist the knife that much deeper). As John Walker wrote, "to describe [Photopia] is to destroy it", so go play it for yourself to discover what it's about.

Another excellent programming puzzle game from Zachtronics. I'm a sucker for touches like tucking away the documentation inside printable zines with extra worldbuilding, and I really enjoyed trying to work around the kinds of very limited constraints that Exapunks revels in. (My kingdom for just one more register!)

Besides the main programming puzzles, there's also the obligatory solitaire variant (which I always enjoy), an arcade puzzle game (I'm no better at it than I was at the expanded version in Last Call BBS, that whole genre isn't really my thing but I'm sure other people will have fun with it), a level editor, a multiplayer hacker battle mode (I didn't try it myself but the hacker battle levels in the main campaign were neat), and wildly, a sandbox for making your own video games for a virtual handheld console, using the same assembly language that you solve the game's levels with. The thought of trying to make a video game within Exapunks' constraints is staggering to me, but then again people have made playable games in everything from Minecraft to Baba Is You, so I'm sure some ambitious programmers out there have actually made use of it.

Anyways, I thought the final level was gonna be the death of me, but I did conquer it in the end and it was immensely satisfying. Probably gonna give Exapunks a rest for now and save the post-game bonus levels for later since I'm currently feeling kinda at my limit with the game, but overall I had a great time with it.