

If you're a user of modern-day programming languages with names evocative of coffee or jewelry, you might-like I did-find this language frustratingly limited. If that kind of thing appeals to you, you'll be right at home here. I usually found myself revisiting a solution to see if I could tighten it up, using fewer jumps or shaving off a couple of cycles. Completing a puzzle (a specification) means matching a set of inputs to the right outputs, and rewards the player by marking that specification "nominal" and ranking the solution among those of other players in terms of instructions, nodes and execution cycles used. Instead of coaxing sprites to move around on the screen, the programmer of the TIS-100 must visualize pointers jumping between instructions and numbers flowing in and out of registers. The puzzle solving is achieved by typing a kind of assembly language into each of the individual nodes, in stark black and white with an appropriately monospace font. The entire game is drawn in ASCII line-art representing tessellated nodes in a mysterious computer, and the items being passed around between the nodes are just integers. TIS-100, too, involves orchestrating the repetitive, synchronized shuffling of items between stations, but it throws away the graphics of its predecessor in favor of an old-school computer aesthetic.
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SpaceChem was graphically rich and centered around a molecular-assembly conceit the way the chemicals travelled around the screen was reminiscent of a factory full of conveyor belts, and successful jockeying of the atoms rewarded the player with stylized images of uranium, oxygen or hydrogen bound together into completed molecules. The caveat is that TIS-100, more than most games, has a pretty high bar to entry: this is a game for experienced programmers.
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The game manual is completely in-character: a PDF of a well-used copy of the strange computer's printed instruction manual, which offers very little hand-holding for the uninitiated, instead getting right down to business describing operating parameters and detailing the game's instruction set. The player must program each node individually so that they cooperate to do tasks like multiply numbers or detect maximums within a sequence. Sometimes it takes several complete restarts to find the solution, but the feeling of accomplishment when you finally achieve that output can be extremely rewarding. Both games center on analyzing a problem, conceptualizing and constructing a system to transform some given inputs into a desired output, then pressing "run" and standing back to watch your system either fulfill your desires perfectly or go completely awry. If you enjoyed SpaceChem for its brain-bendingly difficult puzzles built on abstract thinking and planning, it's likely (with one caveat) that you'll appreciate TIS-100 for the same reasons. Anyone who played SpaceChem will notice similarities between that game and this latest effort, as they follow the same spirit of game design.
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You're given a literal manual for the titular computer, a "massively parallel computer architecture comprised of non-uniformly interconnected heterogeneous nodes", and tasked with using the information gleaned from that manual to not only properly code and complete puzzles as efficiently as possible, all under a very serious guise of realism, but also potentially discovering who really built the machine, and why. TIS-100 is an indie puzzle game from Zachtronics, the developer of Infinifactory, Ironclad Tactics and SpaceChem.
