QuantumPulse 2A

Great Open-Ended / Problem-Solving puzzle game (I refuse to use the term "Zach-like", even Zach himself describe his games as "Open-Ended"), with the unique feature of using radio channels to maintain and synchronize your code among multiple chips!

Tentatively recommending. It's scratching my zachtronics itch but the performance is abysmal. I'm getting sub 30 fps with an i7+4090

Sorry to vote down when it only has that few reviews yet. But as fun as the demo was ... once you get to level 8+ the awkwardness of the channel system and the restrictions of what you can do on one chip start to hit the ceiling of my tolerance. I've played many similar games. I'm fine with Assembly-like languages, but you can't even do a simple ADD or SUB instruction here. You have to use 2 chips to overlay 2 values on a channel to add them and then need a 3rd chip to read the result, bc you are not allowed to read a channel your chip has written to that same cycle. And then sync everythig up again. That's like rolling a pancake until it gets invisible... It looks like TIS-100, but it's not. TIS has a vastly more flexible language and creates difficulty without making you feel like you're too dumb to understand the system itself. The positive aspects last: - It has good QoL in the editor, apart from the deliberate restrictions - The little language features it has are well thought through and even allow abbreviations and shortcuts - It allows to start inefficient in most levels and to optimize later (which TIS-100 does not at the same extent) - Has decent humor and sort of a funny introduction to all levels. - Dev is active in Steam forums, not just Discord It's by no means a bad or badly put together game, but I can't be bothered to work around the needlessly awkward rules, when the solution is already in my head. It's not like the game gives you a slightly too small tool to push creative solutions and to generate a challenge. It's like it's giving you a hammer to put in a screw, which makes you fight your tool more than your task. This is no fun for me.