The Signal State

A good puzzle game to play, it can be a bit hard to solve the puzzles. But there are some great guides for how to solve them.

Interesting messaging, but it is subtle enough to not care about that. The puzzles, however, are amazing. I really liked formulating custom logic gates to solve some of the achievements, and this has grown my desire to learn more about computer science given the limits to how you are allowed to transfigure inputs.

好玩

不需要管那些乱七八糟的线，你只要知道，这玩意能跑就行了：）

好玩

It's a pretty neat zach-like, though a bit on the shorter side, even including the optional puzzles. It's also not that hard, I finished it in one sitting. There were like two or three optional puzzles that took me 30-60 minutes, but those were outliers, with most of non-trivial puzzles taking me around 15 minutes. In the game, you manipulate analog signals with various modules connected with cables. You have an input signal (or signals) and a target output, kinda like in Shenzhen I/O. Each of the modules does a specific "thing" with the signal, and you have to combine their effects to reach your goal. At the beginning, the game spends a pretty long time teaching you its mechanics and basic modules. It's probably a good thing, though it can be a bit tedious if you're a quick learner, or have some prior knowledge about logic gates and such. On the other hand, I feel like the game only tutorializes how the modules work on a pretty basic level. To give an early example, when the basic logic modules are introduced, you're only shown how they interact with binary signals, but knowing how they work with analog signals is essential to progress further in the game. Now, I do like figuring things out on my own, but i also think that a game's tutorials should spend more time on things that are harder to understand, rather than very basic ones. One thing that was left mostly unexplained, and the source of a lot of my confusion, was the way that the game's tick/timing system works. I kind of dislike it. On the surface, it looks like all of the modules work concurrently, you might even think that one module can do one "action" per tick, since that's kind of what it looks like when playing back your solution, but that's not really the case, If you make a feedback loop in some way, you'll see that a module will keep performing actions, until its input stabilizes. My main problem with it is that it's really hard to debug your solutions in that case, since you can only step forwards one "tick" and not one "action". It also leads to situations where a display on a module can show wrong information, which for me, caused a lot of confusion. The game has a hint system if you ever get stuck. They're a mixed bag. Sometimes you get something helpful, sometimes its an annoying "you can use the module that does X thing to do X thing" I really like the visuals. The modules look really stylish. A really nice touch is that each one of them has a manufacturer with a distinct visual style, it adds a bit of personality to the modules. It's also really fun to sometimes take a step back and look at the mess you've made with all the cables and stuff, though admittedly it rarely gets to that point. You usually have plenty of space for your solution, and dont need that many modules to solve a puzzle. The ending of the game was pretty abrupt. I don't mean the ending of the story, mostly I mean that the game ends on a relatively simple puzzle, there's no difficult end-game puzzle that tests your complete understanding of the game. There's also no extra optional puzzles after you beat the game. You just unlock the ability to use every module in previous puzzles. I feel like the last optional puzzle of the game would work better as a "capstone" puzzle, if it was unlocked after the ending. On the level select screen it sits right before the comparatively easier final puzzle, and that doesn't really sit right with me. All that being said, it's still a fun game and I liked playing it, though i'd probably recommend grabbing it during a sale.