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dkirschner's 7 Billion Humans (PC)
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| [March 29, 2022 06:23:50 PM]
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It appears that the devs behind World of Goo and Little Inferno puzzle games have moved toward programming puzzles! This was a surprise for my non-programmer self. I've tried plenty of games that benefit from programming knowledge (e.g., the Zachtronics catalog) and typically enjoy them until they get beyond me. 7 Billion Humans was no different. You are presented with puzzles and commands in a programming language. In each puzzle, you have to make workers perform mundane office tasks (arranging data in specific order, shredding documents, etc.). Well, sort of mundane. You see, the world is controlled by robot overlords and they are training humans (you) to become self-sufficient and manage themselves to solve problems. The mundane tasks you program workers to complete are actually having big impact: solving climate change, growing enough food for everyone on the planet, providing free public transit, and so on. The game has the critical humor I expected, at least.
Puzzles begin easily enough. You might be asked to make workers to pick up a datacube in front of them and then drop it in their original location. That would require commands: step (forward) --> pick up (datacube) --> step (backward) --> drop. These get increasingly complex, of course, and I gave up about halfway through, on level 31 or something, when I had to make workers pick up documents from a printer and arrange the documents in a checkerboard pattern, while not falling through several holes in the floor. This used various commands, including takeFrom (printer) to get the document, "if" commands with directions to guide their walking so they don't fall into holes, the "nearest" command to make sure they are going to the printer to get documents and not picking them up off the ground, "memory" commands so they remember where the nearest printer is, and so on. I couldn't figure it out and looked on YouTube. Once I saw how unlikely it was that I would have figured out that solution, I looked at some of the next solutions too. All brutally difficult for me! I realized that this was my wall and bowed out. Later levels have you writing memory (instead of just remembering something that already exists), performing arithmetic on datacube values, and actually programming communication between workers to synchronize their actions.
So, I'm glad I stopped, but glad I tried it out. Many of the puzzles I did solve made me feel very clever indeed.
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dkirschner's 7 Billion Humans (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got frustrated
GameLog started on: Tuesday 15 March, 2022
GameLog closed on: Tuesday 29 March, 2022 |
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This is the only GameLog for 7 Billion Humans. |
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