Rogue Bit

I picked this game up on sale for $2, and for that price I did enjoy my first playthrough a fair bit and really love the idea. But on the whole I think the game falls quite short of what it could be and ends up just feeling unfinished. I think the "maze" aspect at the core of this game can overshadow the programming logic side of things. Especially in the first half of the game, the puzzles are just "be in the right spot at the right time to be teleported." You're intended to find those solutions by reading the assembly code, but it's very possible to "brute force" a lot of the game without any real understanding. Even if you aren't deliberately cheesing the game, I solved a number of the puzzles completely on accident. The sections where you "hack" the assembly are quite narrow due to the XOR movement mechanic. You can only "fit" into certain lines of code, making it fairly obvious where the solution is. It's a great mechanic, I just wish it were more open ended. At the end of the game, memory pages are introduced which have a lot of exciting potential! Weaving two assembly programs together increases the complexity a good bit, as does unlocking the ability to move between CPU registers. Unfortunately after only one puzzle with this mechanic, the game comes to an abrupt end. It really feels like the dev gave up halfway through and published what was done. Thank goodness for custom levels, I foolishly thought. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever created any. Furthermore, the memory page mechanic is NOT available in the custom level creator!! The entire game feels like a tutorial leading up to this mechanic, it's unbelievable that there's nothing further. I finished the game in just 100 minutes. My current playtime includes a second playthrough to replay the puzzles I solved by accident in my first, as well as to earn all achievements. [hr][/hr] My final two criticisms are pretty minor nitpicks stemming from my prior experience in memory hacking: 1. Memory addresses are basically written backwards, being labeled as XXYY. This makes a certain amount of sense in translating the idea of memory addresses to an (X,Y) coordinate grid for a layperson. But it is reverse of what an actual 256x256 memory dump would look like, which would start at 0000 and end the first "line" at 00FF, starting the "next line" at 0100. The game instead goes from 0000 to FF00 to 0001. That's just not how hexadecimal works, nor numbers in general. This made it difficult for me to make intuitive sense of where key addresses were in the maze. The B hotkey to highlight addresses referenced in the assembly would be more helpful if the blue boxes were labeled with their addresses. 2. Five bytes wide is such a strange number for the binary display. A power of 2 would have been more "traditional." I found it to be frustratingly narrow when using it to navigate, especially when page flipping to find hidden paths at the end of the game. I would have preferred hexadecimal instead for its 4x information density. I do understand that a layperson would probably have more trouble interpreting whether The Bit is on or off for a given byte when represented in hexadecimal. However, I think the "blue = wall" color coding already communicates the idea sufficiently.