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I'm Talen! I make videos and articles and games and graphic designs and guides and messes and encouragement. Chances are you can find anything I do on my blog. I like it when you comment on my things, so please do!
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in reply to @TalenLee's post:
gno;r;obhrio;wrnhiwa(probably start with Opus Magnum, it's the most approachable in my opinion)bnruilwebaugirwag'p
Though I should mention, given your areas of interest, that the old 2009 games are very interesting. https://www.zachtronics.com/zach-like/
Anyway Infinifactory kicks ass and isn't actually super hard because it lets you fumble around in an actual 3D space with toys and tools.
I spent part of the weekend sickos mode returning to TIS-100 after like 6 years. It’s very good, I don’t really recommend that one though.
Seconding Opus Magnum (which they mailed me a pretty physical patch for completing back in the day!) it makes pretty gifs.
i fell off opus magnum almost immediately and i'm the kind of person who played TIS-100 to completion. play last call imo
a colleague saying "hey you're pretty good at TIS-100, have you considered programming professionally?" helped convince me to quit my job, literally life-changing. sadly now that i program as my job i have less energy for playing them
if you're looking for somewhere to start opus magnum is a relatively gentle introduction. if you want the "reading the docs and programming something" experience, i really like exapunks
if you actually don't want to solve puzzles, eliza is a pretty good VN
I haven't played all the Zachtronics games but I did get pretty obsessed with them for a few months last year (when I realized Last Call BBS was coming out soon, I hadn't played any since the flash games and spacechem, and there was a bundle on sale with all their puzzle games). Opus Magnum definitely feels like the most accessible to me, even as someone with programming brain, I do think it depends on how well you think through different kinds of problems though - I think there's a rough division between the "move pieces around a board" and "actually write some assembly" Zachtronics games, and for some folks dealing with numbers in registers is going to be easier to conceptualize than moving marbles around a board.
Aside from being more visual and spatial, Opus Magnum also has the nicest presentation and onboarding, IMO, and doesn't do the Extremely Zachtronics thing of asking you to print out a PDF of a fake manual, which several other games do (and which is cool and fun IMO but may contribute to being hard to just sit down and play).
Of their "sit down and write some assembly" games, I think Shenzhen I/O is the strongest. It was the first one I played during my tour of their games, and it felt like it gave you just enough room to feel like you can do basic things easily but bump up against the programming limitations repeatedly, or to accomplish a task in a straightforward way then realize other people solved it way more efficiently and look over your solution wondering how (OM is also great at this part). Where-as TIS-100 felt so restrictive it was hard to accomplish anything, and Exapunks felt more like an exercise in figure out what you were supposed to do than how. Shenzhen I/O also just has some fun writing and framing of the programming problems, and while I wouldn't say anyone plays Zachtronics puzzle games for the story, it might be the most charming writing they've done (though Last Call BBS is close).
Incidentally, one of my first chosts was an essay on TIS-100 and how the lack of onboarding and obtuse interface plays into the theme of the games itself. I never did get around to the other essays I suggested, though I think I did make a less organized chost about how the end of Exapunks's story felt like a let down.