7 Billion Humans

Where Human Resource Machine teaches basic programming, 7 Billion Humans teaches basic multithreaded programming. The puzzles are still fairly well thought out, where easy to explain goals become challenging and rewarding to encode as algorithms. The cutscenes are even better than Human Resource Machine, and can even be skipped if you aren't into them. But the actual design seems far less coherent than I had hoped. Some the instructions you can give your workers are simple (listening for a signal, picking up a box in a certain direction, taking a single step), others are extremely complex ideas put into a single magic operation (Pick up the nearest box, give box to the nearest shredder, find the nearest worker). I wish all the instructions were simple building blocks, or that they all were high-level. There are situations where a high-level instruction does almost (but not quite) what you want (find the nearest box larger than the one I am standing over), and now you must essentially re-implementing what was before a single instruction. You also do not have access to all instructions in all later assignments. I guess that in some ways this represents different requirements, but it makes me wish that these were branching assignment paths, and not all in the same line of required assignments. I wish the puzzles were simply more carefully designed to make those omitted instructions less useful instead of just hiding them. The debugger can also become quite cumbersome. In HRM you could rewind one step, but in this game you cannot. If you step once too far, or only notice a certain situation after it has occurred, you cannot rewind to see how it happened. You must instead start over and watch how it occurred. It is also a major issue that you can't always click on a worker to see their state if a worker with a thought bubble is directly in front.

If you enjoy programming, this may be a good game to check out. However, I'd recommend trying their previous game first. The reason this game falls short is that, unlike the previous game, your data set is no longer fully randomized. In the first game, all solutions should be solved with logic. If you want to beat the size challenge, you make a small but inefficient program. If you want to beat the speed challenge, you make a large but efficient program. In this game, you know the entire level layout ahead of time, so your efficient solutions will involve stuff like: 1) Figuring out who each worker is 2) Telling each worker exactly what to do to complete their job. (i.e. worker #1: go left, pickup, go up, drop) Not only is this tedious, it's not representative of real-life programming. The previous game's challenges will teach you to be a better programmer; this game's challenges will teach you to be a worse one.

7 Billion Humans is a game about learning coding, with a focus on parallel processing - not that it ever admits that. You write instructions, and swarms of little humans execute them simultaneously. If you're smart and lucky, your code achieves the desired result. If not... The coding UI is surprisingly clean and intuitive, and the puzzle designs are good. Probably my only real complaint is that it feels like a game of two worlds. For those who actually know how to code, the later problems feel like actual work. For those who don't, there may not be enough random humorous consequences along the way to get them to stick it through. Nevertheless, it's a solid, highly-professional game, and if "coding puzzles" at all sounds interesting to you, this is what you're looking for.

7 Billion Humans is rather fun and very similar to Human Resource Machine. If you like their previous game you should like this one. If you were annoyed by the lack of settings, infamously the music volume, or missing editing features, you will be annoyed in this one too. The developer chose to ignore the many requests. Furthermore, I haven't seen replies in the forums and bug reports were ignored as well. The general idea is using parallel programming with a few simple functions to solve puzzles in a robot-driven corporate setting, and the same dark humour as HRM. Some of the functions are not always available for no obvious reason, some functions have an inconsistent behaviour - much more so than HRM. It's still fun to play though. The size & speed challenges are similar to HRM. Many of them have low records, and when I looked them up I found that they're usually achieved by hacking the game rather than being smart with the given tools, so one should not focus too much on them except to try something different. I would have given a 3 or perhaps even a 4 if the previous issues had been solved. But I'm sensitive to the support, or lack of support, and ignoring them and the bugs is not playing in their favour. Take this game in a sales if you like programming-oriented puzzles.