Lambda Spellcrafting Academy - Learn to Program!

This is cute, and I had fun, but this is [i]really[/i] hard to recommend. I don't think I've seen an attempt at a Lisp-like programming game, but there's just... not enough here. [i]Alan's Automaton Workshop[/i] is a similar idea: Drag-and-drop a program into place in a neat tree-like structure, though obviously a Turing Machine is a different approach than a Lambda Calculus. But [i]Alan's[/i] has a full-blown visual novel. Aside from the state-machine tree, it has a ton of components to wire together, all of which have their own sounds. It has some pretty solid background music. Even the 'tree' part has more to it -- it's not a tree, it's a graph, and you can freely rearrange the nodes, copy/paste, add comments, and otherwise handle much larger programs. It took me 25 hours. But maybe that's an unfair comparison, maybe you can't get that much artwork... or maybe you want a minimalist aesthetic... Except then there's [i]TIS-100[/i], which looks and feels like an old DOS-era machine, works entirely in text... but took me 35 hours, and [i]still[/i] had kind of a compelling story buried in the margins... and it also had [i]juice[/i]. You can't click [i]anything[/i] in TIS without a click or a clack or even old-school hard drive noise. When you run your program, even fast mode still animates in a way that's far more satisfying than Lambda just auto-passing you as soon as it knows the program is done. Each error makes a noise as the error happens. When you finish a level, you get a little success chime. Even closing the game makes a noise like a CRT shutting down. [i]Lambda[/i] has none of that. The only sound effect in the game is the cat, and it's an annoying sound, not a cute one. The only animation I can remember is a very slow way to step through the program. So if the developer is reading this, my #1 recommendation is to add juice, even for a zach-like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=216_5nu4aVQ The other recommendation is: Either more content, or at least do more with the concept. A limited number of cards severely limits the game's potential for sandboxes -- I can't even define more variables than the problem had in mind! Even when stepping through, there's no way to track variable bindings. And despite 'lambda' in the name, the game never actually gives us lambdas! Unfortunately, adding harder, more-complex problems would probably also raise a bunch of QoL issues... Then there's the price point and the play time. If it were free, maybe I could say it's at least interesting and worth a look. But it's more expensive than both of the other games I mentioned, and it takes an hour and a half instead of 25+ hours. This is not normally a comparison I like to make, because there are plenty of amazing short games, and I'm not all that price-sensitive anyway. But it's kind of the final straw here: It's short and [i]not[/i] amazing.