Comet 64

The puzzles took me about 5 hours in total to solve. It would probably take quite a bit longer to get all optimization stars, but I don't plan to do so. I do Advent of Code puzzles as a pastime, so I don't know if I would be the target demographic. I didn't find the puzzles all that difficult. The primary issue is not the algorithm itself, but trying to implement it with such an incredibly limited language and VM. Extremely few registers, no variables, etc... You do get a fairly nice debugger, allowing you to step through a program as it executes, set break points, and so on. I think without those tools (programming "in the dark" so to speak) it would be much, much harder. Pacing seems good. The bonus levels (the A: and B: disks) can all be cheesed very simply using a technique that would be familiar to competitive programmers, but I won't go into that here to prevent spoilers. It would probably be more fun to ignore that technique in favor of coordinate tracking (which is described in the instruction manual). My only criticism is the lack of any kind of story. The store page makes it sound as though there is some narrative that unfolds as you get further and further in, but there is none. The ending content is .... minimalistic. If that's what you want - some fun, highly restrictive programming puzzles - this is great. If you want to solve things and along the way have new mysteries revealed, then this is probably not the game for you. I can see this as a good "intro to assembly language" experience, since you get familiar with manually managing state, creating WHILE loops by using GOTO equivalents, and so on. Having the optimization targets be both lines of code (code golf) AND total instructions executed (performance optimization) also help toward this goal. It made me appreciate FOR loops, advanced iterators, and higher-order-functions. Not being allowed to use variables really drives home how nice they are. :-)