[h1]Opus Magnum but worse[/h1]
This feels too harsh and mean for this game. It's a cool concept, and I enjoyed my time with it! I want to like it, but it's hard to recommend.
The game puts "zach-like" in the description, and that invites comparisons with games like Opus Magnum. Right now, it's even priced the same. But just about everything it does well, Opus Magnum does better, and it's missing some very large quality-of-life features that made the second half of the game tedious in a way most Zachtronics aren't.
[h2]Mechanics[/h2]
It feels a bit like a 2D Infinifactory, or a square Opus Magnum. The unusual part is that there are a few different kinds of robots, and they're pretty flexible. Your core tools are using those bots and conveyors to move food into frying pans and boiling pots and so on, transforming a stack of one kind of food into another kind of food.
Here's the thing, though: Historically, when Zachtronics does this (Infinifactory, Spacechem, Opus Magnum), transforming one item into another is only part of it. You're also trying to build a [i]shape[/i] by sticking pieces together, and maneuvering that shape efficiently is a significant part of the challenge. When we're only stacking things (the Food Court in Last Call BBS), the challenge will often include some more intricate logic to make up for a lack of robots -- Infinifactory might force you to use sensors and timers to wire things up; 21st Century Food Court will force you to wire together a bunch of logic modules alongside the assembly line.
Neon Noodles has none of that. At first, the simplicity was appealing. By the end of the game, it feels more like a lack of depth.
There were one or two levels where we got a glimpse of how you could build a much trickier puzzle game out of this. One level limits you to three robots, all linked, bans all other bots, and forces you to build a complex recipe. It stood out as one of the few times I was forced to learn some strategy other than just throwing ingredients A into pot B and conveying the result to pan C.... but:
[h3]Quality-of-Life[/h3]
...when the game actually got challenging, it was an absolute pain!
Most Zach-likes make some effort to make it easy to rearrange things when your design isn't working. Infinifactory and Opus Magnum include one feature that's badly needed here: Select a bunch of stuff you've already put down, and drag it around all at once. Instead, if you've set up your entire production line one square too far to the left, you have to drag everything you've put down [i]one at a time[/i] one square to the right.
And at that point, I usually leave everything where it is and patch things together with drones or teleporters. And those drones end up being super slow and blowing up the cycle count, but at that point, I'd rather just get through the level.
And that's just the physical layout! The bot programming theoretically is as powerful as Opus Magnum, but it's so much more obnoxious to use. I've seen the cursor glitch to a character (or more?) away from where the operation will actually be inserted. There isn't a good way to insert a "repeat what I just said twice and then go back to the start". Scrolling around and editing is janky and choppy, and instead of a dedicated "return" symbol like Opus Magnum (that gets recomputed if you add more instructions), there's a return [i]editing button[/i] that inserts all the operations needed, so I'm constantly having to go back and edit the end of a program to reflect what I did in the middle.
So if I ever have timing issues, instead of going back and rearranging the bot's programs, I'll just insert a bunch of waits.
I can see where there [i]could[/i] be a fun challenge in trying to really optimize your build and get a high score. With rare exceptions, that's the main source of challenge anyway. But with how obnoxious it is to edit a mostly-working solution, I usually wasn't compelled to try to optimize an already-working solution.
As a result, it was a pretty severe difficulty spike when the game hits you with something like the three robots or an overly-constrained map, because I had no practice optimizing, because optimizing is so annoying to do.
[h2]Setting and theme[/h2]
The idea of a very cyberpunk, abstract, neon-infused food factory sounds appealing! But the execution is... maybe [i]too[/i] abstract. Opus Magnum's machines make all sorts of interesting sounds as they clang, whirr, and zap. Neon Noodles just quietly whooshes. Cutting, boiling, frying, chilling, and conveyor belts are all completely silent, all we hear are the robots whooshing around.
Like any good cyberpunk story, this makes a point about society, about corporations at the top controlling everyone down to the food we eat... but this is undermined by how clean the game's visuals are. Occasionally, a background might vaguely look dirty, but you're still going to be moving around abstract neon icons. There's nothing like the whale level in Infinifactory, where you might feel bad about carving up this magnificent creature and throwing most of the carcass into the abyss, and it might even motivate you to try the extra challenge of beating the level with only a single whale. In Neon Noodles, anything you waste goes to a "recycler" for "zero food waste," which feels like a missed opportunity. But even if the game [i]did[/i] try to push us towards minimizing waste, it's still much harder to care what happens to a little neon square with some squiggles on it.
This also makes it that much harder to be satisfied with a solution. It's very cool to see Infinifactory put together a big 3D model piece by piece, until it comes together into something that looks like your goal. In Opus Magnum, you get a big kathunk sound for every product you deliver. In Neon Noodles, the goal is just another icon.
[h2]Story[/h2]
It's cool that it exists, and it's not a [i]bad[/i] story. It's just not a very good one, especially stretched over the length of the game. Maybe that's the point -- you'll solve multiple puzzles without even any flavortext about why you're making this recipe or who the food is for, because you're just playing along. But compare it to something like Opus Magnum or Alan's Automaton Workshop, where just about every level in the main story had some dialog leading in, and sometimes there were pretty major developments between chapters!
There's a very good [i]premise,[/i] but there's just not that much to the actual storytelling.
It isn't really tied to what you're building, either. The only way the story ties into the food is [spoiler]someone snuck a (computer) virus into the food somehow[/spoiler], or [spoiler]someone poisoned the food[/spoiler], or you're just making the food for someone important. But for each of these plot points, the actual level is interchangeable. Compare that to Infinifactory, where [spoiler]one factory builds shuttles to escape and another builds missiles and fires them at enemy ships[/spoiler], or Opus Magnum, where you'll build everything from hangover cures to subtle poisons, or even 21st Century Cafe, where everything you make gets a fun thematic description, and the results even get reviews!
