This game is probably one of the best games I've played and it's really sad that it doesn't get more attention. I'm not sure if this game has a marketing issue or is just too niche for people, but it should definitely be more popular.
TL;DR - This is a game that a programming beginner can pick up and play as well as a more advanced programmer, and players of all skill levels can have fun. There's no need to worry about getting bogged down in syntax or math, and the programming skills can directly translate to programming in real-world languages if you're a beginner looking to learn.
Note: My playtime is massively inflated because I was alt-tabbed out for most of it at work.
As somebody with a beginner level of programming knowledge, I was looking for a game that allowed a beginner to write text-based code to solve challenges. These sort of games are few and far between, and it's extremely rare for them to be fun. But Robo Instructus is one of the few games that accomplishes this very well.
In this game, you are slowly introduced to functions which allow you to slowly learn the easy-to-use game language. While it's not a real programming language, it is similar enough to real scripting languages that it allows the player to use and practice real programming without worrying about learning difficult syntax.
I played at the same time as a couple of my friends who are programmers, and I was able to outscore them on many challenges. This is actually where most of the fun came from.
Simply completing a challenge is just the start, but thinking about different ways to tackle the same problem to improve my score is where I spent most of my time. The game has a global stats scoreboard as well as showing you how your friends did.
Some of the early levels allow for cheese code where you manually give all directions, which is not a fun way to complete a level (you shouldn't cheese starting levels). But after the first few levels, the game introduces "dark levels" to make cheese impossible because you can't see the game area for the final level. This forces you to write code that works in any circumstance, because you don't know what your robot will be facing.
Throughout the course of playing, my confidence with programming grew tremendously. I felt like I would just need to learn the syntax of other programming languages and most of what I learned in Robo Instructus definitely transfers over to programming in other languages.
I was so confident near the end of the game, that I decided to go all out an build a pathfinding system from scratch to guide my robot. This is not the way that the game expects you to complete the last level. It's also very inefficient, but it allowed me to demonstrate to myself the programming knowledge I picked up along the way. And one of the great things about this game is the freedom to program whatever solutions we could come up with.
I put in a ton of work and created my pathfinding program for the final level. When I finally ran it, my code worked flawlessly to determine the shortest viable path and guide my robot to the end. At least, it worked flawlessly until the dark level. For reasons totally unknown to me, my code didn't work in the dark level. There was some sort of bug which I am incapable of debugging because I can't see what went wrong.
This will not be an issue for most players, and it's probably just a bug in my code, but it was extremely disappointing that I couldn't finish the last level without totally starting over and completing the code in the manner that was most likely the intended way. But this is ultimately my only complaint with the game. While completion of the non-dark levels without cheese code should allow for the completion of the dark levels, I was ultimately stuck because my code worked in the non-dark levels fine and only ran into issues in the dark level.
I'd rate this game a 9/10 and it'd be 10/10 if it wasn't for my inability to debug the last level, although I know that I could complete the level by starting over and completing it a different way.
I also feel it's necessary to note that some of the negative reviews on this game are downright bizarre. A dev with 10 years experience thought it got too complicated? As a beginner, I had no issues. But the lack of players on this game could make it more difficult to get more clarification from the community if your'e confused.
There's a review with a complaint about "hardcoded levels," this is the cheese I mentioned and disappears after the first few levels. People can just choose not to cheese it or go through a few levels so the problem disappears.
There's also a couple of complaints in reviews about your robot turning when you tell it to move forward. This is explained well in the game and really isn't complicated. You're moving from triangle to triangle so your robot can't face straight after moving forward to a new tile, or it would be facing the triangle point where you can't move. I don't expect anybody who actually tries to understand the system to have problems with it.
I wouldn't let these complaints deter you from trying the game.
