Quick Review: Human Resource Machine

The day I thought I was done delivering numbers in a factory, they pull me right back in!

Only one employee to do all this? Geez, big companies
and their stupid staff cuts...

A game by Tomorrow Corporation released on October 15th, 2015, Human Resource Machine can best be described as a “programming puzzle game”. You are not quite in control of your character; the crux of gameplay is setting up a series of commands, and then seeing whether they yield the desired result. Then, if the solution didn’t work: Extensively test each step, correct the bugs, make sure you don’t create ten more by accident (the joys of programming!), run, playtest and debug until you get the right combination of events to solve the puzzle.

In this game’s context, you start as a new employee in some nebulous delivery company, and you are tasked on each floor with delivering specific numbers from the Inbox area, and to the Outbox. The requirement changes every time. Your first commands are Inbox and Outbox, obviously, and starting at the second level you obtain the Jump command, which you can set after any other command and place the jump destination anywhere in the program, even at the very start, to skip steps or create a loop.

Still not sure why they added letters here, other than to make
your tasks even harder to deal with. Congrats to this game for
making me dread/hate letters, somehow.

If you think that's a lot of arrows going up and down
and all over the place in the command line... Ha. It gets
soooo much worse later on.

Past these are the Copyfrom and Copyto commands. Your worker can use the square tiles at the center of the room to set down numbers from the Inbox for later use, or copy a number already set there. Well… numbers, or letters. After which you can deliver to Outbox a copied number. After which, you get increasingly complex requests, such as Outboxing a set of two numbers in the reverse order (set the first on a square, deliver the second, pick up the first with Copyfrom, deliver it). After this? We get commands for addition and subtraction. And new Jump commands with conditions (jumping to other sets of commands if the number is 0, or negative).

Why the Hell does the program thinks letters count as a
zero anyway?? Shaking my damn head...

These add up on the command board, and it can turn into a complete mess of orders and arrows pointing up and down and everywhere, so the game later introduces the ability to leave notes along the command line, and a few levels later, the same for squares on the ground, “naming” them so you can remember their purpose. Great idea! Or, would be if you could actually type that text somehow, but instead all you have is your mouse, a large brush, and you can only draw the letters, so good luck fitting more than 7 characters on there. For the smaller print of the floor tiles, I can understand, but the notes within the program? Come on now.

"Mult"? ...I play too much Balatro...

Ugh! Management, never happy. Why do I still bother with
this when I could be working anywhere else...

And now, the mechanic that will make you go “Oh, this is a programming game”, something you might either love, or hate, or be divided on as I was: If you come up with a functional but imperfect solution for the set of numbers you were given, you’ll be told that it did work as intended… but then, your boss refuses the solution and gives you an Inbox sequence that will make your solution fail. By running the simulation, you can follow step by step and figure out where things go wrong – and you can rewind at will, but that’s not going to help if you can’t spot the error (or can’t figure out a way to solve it that doesn’t break something else)…

Oh hey, I finally did something right!

The system for this one is robust and complex, and there’s a bunch of decent mechanics and ideas to be found. The complexity increases as you’re tasked with tougher elements to deal with – stuff like multiplication, zero-terminated strings, Fibonacci sequences, and more. If you’re looking for a crash course puzzle game on programming, this is about as close as it gets, warts and all. It’s satisfying when your solution works for every number set, but it can be very hard to get there, and when it doesn't work, good luck figuring out where you went wrong. However, if you do love these, you can go for the extra challenges where you must reach a level's solution in the smallest amount of steps and/or moves (some levels have “best” solutions that can only be one or the other).

Not one I’d think I’d finish, but I can see why someone would love it enough to strive for its completion.

Human Resource Machine is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD.