
Code Romantic is a computer science puzzle visual novel wrapped in a science fiction love story.
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Languages: English**languages with full audio support
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Reviews
Themes across 40 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
The visual novel is quite charming and oddly delightful, despite taking place during an AI apocalypse and involving a lot of trauma. The art and animation style is simple but cute. The characters are interesting and well-rounded. The romance is realistic and adorable. For that reason, it's really worth getting just as a visual novel. This is why I recommend it. It's mostly a kinetic novel, in that there are very few real choices; there are right or wrong answers to the puzzles, and that's about it. In chapter 13, [spoiler]Leon said he'd strip for me, but didn't;[/spoiler] I was disappointed. The coding puzzles are very easy, the sort of thing you can do even if you have never coded before. It could be a good introduction to coding, but as someone with some coding experience, I found it boring. Honestly at times it accurately captures the tedium of checking all your parentheses and semicolons... but is that really what we wanted out of a game? More importantly, there is a very significant error in chapter 12, on big-O complexity: the game characterizes O(n^2) as exponential time. No, it's [i]polynomial[/i] time. (Specifically quadratic, which is a subset of polynomial.) [i]Exponential[/i] time would be O(2^n). These are fundamentally different. The game uses the word "exponential" to describe O(n^2) in at least two places, so it's not just a typo; the author clearly did not understand the difference between polynomial and exponential. Polynomial time is usually tractable; exponential time usually isn't. (Consider n=100: 100^2 = 10,000, while 2^100 = 1.267e30.) There's literally a million-dollar prize for anyone who can prove whether it's possible to solve certain problems (e.g. SAT) in polynomial time, which are already known to be solvable in exponential time. So anyone who didn't already know about complexity theory would be learning something [b]very wrong[/b] from this game. That error needs to be fixed.
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Modeled estimate over time, reconstructed from Steam's monthly review histogram.
Hours played at review time, across 40 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
10/10 would story code again. I would recommend for coding beginners to help have a bit of a solid grounding before learning more. It's still fun playing when the coding problems are trivial to you. My favorite part were the logic/math puzzles in-between challenges which I assume were optional. I may have shipped a couple of characters I knew wouldn't end up together and yelled at the story a couple of times... but in a good way.
Really nice artwork and story! As a programmer, it's fun to fantasize of being in this story where I use my programming knowledge to save the world. I'm currently through the first three chapters (the third chapter was in the demo, so I sped through it in the full game)
Super fun coding game! I have some experiences in coding before and there were a few that are tricky. If you don't have any, that okay! you can definitely learn the basic concept of C. Beside that I really like the storyline and the romance between the two main characters
A história é bem Malhação com toques de introdução à programação na linguagem C. É muito legal para quem é adolescente no meio para o final do Ensino Médio. Para mim foi bem bobinho, mas ainda acho que vale a pena pra quem gosta de VN e tem interesse na área de programação (mas não tem nenhuma ou pouca noção).
Cute boys, some programming and riddles, 100% quality time
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I had a great time with Code Romantic, and I'd encourage anyone curious to try it! But it's hard to pin down the audience for this game, and it helps to have the right expectations to enjoy it. - As a VN: the characters and their relationships are cute and often relatable, and the sci-fi setting is intriguing. But you get no player agency at all. They all have set personalities, you have no dialog choices, and there are no romance routes or relationship flags like a dating VN. I'm a programmer in my day job, so the premise comes off a bit like cringe-y programmer wish fulfillment, but I found it really endearing by coming into it with an open mind and giving it a few chapters to get going. - As a puzzle game: it sits in a peculiar no-man's-land. Other games (e.g. Zachtronics) are more approachable to non-programmers by being very abstract and giving players sandboxes to poke at. Whereas Code Romantic gives players a fairly realistic view of programming syntax and academic jargon, depicted as madlibs-style code pages with multiple-choice answers for each missing term. This means non-programmers can find the wall of code a bit dry or intimidating, while professionals will zoom through the fill-in-the-blank programming while barely engaging it. So who is this game for? You, probably! If you've gotten far enough down the page to read reviews, you definitely have the curiosity to enjoy something like this. It's earnest and wholesome, and I'm looking forward to a sequel!
Я уже написала огромный обзор на эту игру, поэтому второй раз писать не буду. Это прекрасная чудесная новелла, где удивительным образом совместили любовь к литературе, академию, романтику и хакерство. Отдельного разговора заслуживает арт игры. Не представляю сколько сил было потрачено на отрисовку ВСЕГО и анимацию этого. Учитывая, что основная команда игры состояла из 5 человек, то результат просто офигенный. Ради бога сделайте вторую часть!!!
Just finished this game, what a blast! I'm not going to lie, some of the puzzles I had to brute force, not because they're poorly designed, I'm just not adept enough to work some of them out. All in all, I had a great time, lovely art, nice music, interesting puzzles and the story is fun too. Do recommend.
Momentum
Pace estimated from the game's recent review growth (our daily snapshots) at its own sales-per-review ratio — a momentum signal, not booked sales.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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