There’s a thin, thin line between revelation and cheated. Revelation, or a-ha moment, happens when you do something awesome out of the given rules. Feeling cheated, however, happens when you do something awesome out of a hidden rule.

And this game makes me feel cheated. Since the very first level require me to “swap” every single pair of boxes from the stream data. But the protagonist can only hold 1 box at a time. Trying to grab another box and he’ll throw a box in his hand to a recycle bin. So it is impossible to solve the puzzle if these are the only given instructions.

So he can, in addition, copy the box he’s holding onto the ground and vice versa. Despite being somewhat unrealistic, this is fine in term of programming. But executed badly since the instruction to copy something back from the ground say “COPY FROM”. This suggest that I have to hold a box in my hand first. Which seems integrity since I can’t copy my empty hand onto the ground, or copy an empty space from the ground into may hand. Now the puzzle is unsolvable again.

Here’s the cheated part kicked in. Turn out that in order to solve the level, my intuition that I have to hold a box in my hand before copying something into it is wrong. I can make a box out of nowhere by copying a box on the ground! NOT A REVELATION!!!

Also the previous level that should teach this mechanic fail to do its job. Since it urge us to output 3 boxes which form the word “BUG”, by selectively copy a correct given English alphabets on the ground. But that level also gives 4 numeric boxes on the input conveyor belt. Guess what, people will try to grab those number boxes and change it into letter boxes. WHY NOT JUST GIVE 1 INPUT BOX SO WE KNOW RIGHT AWAY THAT WE CAN MAKE BOXES OUT OF NOWHERE!!!!!!!!

That also inconsistent in real life too. Real world programming allow us to copy an empty value anywhere around, which works like deleting. So why prohibits us to “copy empty value” and leads us to these false assumptions anyway.

Skip this game if you’re, or you want to be a programmer.

Originally published on: Steam

neizod

author