The theme of Human Resource Machine is indeed hard, striking, powerful and smart. It is an intriguing way to reveal to people exactly what machines are capable of - giving the opportunity to personally find out how most human tasks can easily be completed without human input…making for quite a disturbing feeling at times. It is also the perfect tool to use for the gameplay of Human Resource Machine as it is basically the same thing that drives the machines out there. It could almost be seen as a simple tutorial on how to program CPUs to perform different tasks with most difficult things scaled off for simplification. The gameplay is based on the ways a CPU works, and is very clever and entertaining for anyone that has ever dipped their toes into programming. It is clever story design using the trademark minimalistic tools that fans of Tomorrow Corporation titles have grown fond of. It is dark humour and society-critic satire, taking a hot topic and turning it into a recognisable, dark, and yet not completely uncomfortable, experience that leaves players with both laughter, but also some horrible, disturbing fridge logic to reflect upon afterwards. In a similar fashion to how Little Inferno played out, the protagonist is once again slowly-but-surely digging their own grave throughout, and, once again, the impression the story leaves afterwards is strong. This is very cleverly portrayed both in terms of the way the events unfold, as well as the game mechanics. The story is simple, yet deep, focusing on industrialisation and how it affects people's lives, putting work into the hands of machines instead, while workers do not even see what is truly going on. This time all lucky breaks are gone as the protagonist is found at the bottom of a big corporation in the position of sorting boxes, with strings of code helping to make the procedure automatic very similar, in fact, to how an actual central processing unit (CPU) in a PC works. I can sense maths teachers across the country lining it up as an end-of-term treat.Dark, satirical, and clever are all words that can be used to describe the latest title from Tomorrow Corporation. It is an exceptional educational game, and it’s impossible that a beginner could escape unenlightened. That’s not to deny its cleverness (or my own ineptitude). There are some dark jokes in there-each year your hair thins a little more and your bosses are steadily replaced by robots-but I don’t feel it capitalises on the setting. It gives you numbers and you add, subtract and 'jump if zero' those numbers to produce other numbers. It teaches core programming concepts in a cartoonified setting, which is great, but the generic megacorp in which you while away your life doesn’t add much context. I can sense maths teachers across the country lining it up as an end-of-term treat.Īnd there’s the issue: Human Resource Machine never presents itself as anything but pedagogical. Indirect access and key-value data pairs follow suit, both vital components of the coder’s utility belt and useful to learn, but perhaps to the point where a little grounding in the theory beforehand would serve novices well. In a particularly nasty example of the latter, each inbox item had to be extracted until a zero was encountered and then sorted into ascending order. Should you make it past basic multiplication-including multiplying two consecutive numbers from the inbox together a feat I was sure was impossible using an add command (it’s not)-developers Tomorrow Corporation continue their programming lesson with Fibonacci sequences and zero-terminated strings. I added each number to itself, and then the sum of that to itself the appropriate number of times: two becomes four becomes eight all the way up to 32 before sticking on a few more twos to make 40. A little factoring, however, and you’re set. I started to realise when a level asked me to multiply each inbox number by a set value such as 40 without a multiply function. The challenge ramps up but the toolbox stays the same, and it's the limitations of that tool box that make Human Resource Machine so challenging. It’s a disarmingly simple toolbox, and for the first few years (levels) on the job longed for more functions to play with. In this case you use rudimentary commands like ‘inbox’, ‘copyto’, ‘add’, ‘bump’ or ‘jump’ to command your minion to take numbers or letters from the inbox on the left, process them according to the demands of your job, and dump the result in the outbox on the right. Human Resource Machine joins Else Heart.Break() and The Magic Circle in letting you play God with the game’s behaviours. Games about coding are becoming rather trendy these days.
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