Human Resource Machine

A technically excellent educational game, but dry for all but maths enthusiasts.

I came out of Human Resource Machine unsure who it was really designed for. It's at times too simple for experienced programmers, and often made leaps too large for beginners to overcome without obtuse outside research. While I had a sense of accomplishment every time I made progress, said progress at times felt like I was an infant thrown into water and expected to swim straight away. I might manage it, but it's not the ideal teaching method to leave me feeling comfortable going forward.

Human Resource Machine is one of the most difficult puzzle games we've played in quite some time. It's not difficult for difficulty's sake though, it's difficult because it's different. It requires you to think less like a gamer and more like a developer. One of Human Resource Machine's only major fault is that there are far too few puzzles; its 38 puzzles go very quickly once you have the hang of how to program, leaving a game that could be completed in under an hour depending on your skill level. For those with no programming background, these same puzzles could take hours of your time. It's an excellent game, it'd just be better if there was more of it; that's not a bad problem to have.By their nature, the puzzles in this game are going to limit its potential audience, and the explanations the game provides don't do the best job of conveying how to order commands and do little to advise on how to optimize your code to achieve secondary objectives. That's appealing for some, but is worth acknowledging as a potential drawback for others.Human Resource Machine is a good game, bordering on great. It's just missing a few little tweaks.

Human Resource Machine is a really smart game and one that makes you feel like both a mastermind at times and, well, quite the opposite too. It throws a unique spin on the puzzle genre which many fans will love but also at times grow frustrated at due to the difficulty spike.

Puzzle games rely on the difficulty of their challenges and Human Resource Machine certainly excels at that. A puzzle game that carves its own territory within the puzzle game genre, this is a work that features a very steep difficulty curve, very demanding challenges, a very peculiar sense of humour and a presence of mathematical elements throughout the whole game. Thanks to its perfect control system, Human Resource Machine is a delight to interact with, the Nintendo Switch is getting the definite version of this unique game.

Human Resource Machine is a game that aims to teach you basic programming. The one thing it fails at is that it forgets to teach - you will soon be tasked with puzzles that seem impossible, making this job-simulator game feel like a real chore. While aesthetically pleasing and certainly charming in an odd way, you will soon be eyeing up a career change!

Human Resource Machine is certainly a fun Nintendo Switch puzzle game with several hours of content. If you're really into programming, then your mileage might vary, and you might be able to complete the game faster. But in the end, for someone like me with zero programming skills, creating a script I then needed to test and debug as needed was a very entertaining experience.

Often too complex and obtuse in its teachings to cater to newcomer coders, Human Resource Machine is bound to push away some of its audience with unnecessary difficulty spikes. On the other hand, successfully wrapping my mind around a difficult problem and coming out victorious is an exhilarating feeling.

Human Resource Machine may be light on story elements, but the programming gameplay is where the game shines. While I came into the game with no programming skills, I felt the game’s difficulty took a wrong turn quite early on in the game. After learning more about the commands and thinking through the puzzles, it greatly helped me complete even more challenging tasks later on in the game.

Similar to the actual programming idea from whence this takes inspiration from, Human Resource Machine is "easy" to learn but, at the same time, quite hard to correctly apply the acquired knowledge. While this basically means that it can lead to some frequent hair-pulling, and although this is not an experience that will last for long, most puzzle fans are strongly advised to try out Tomorrow Corporation's latest release now it's on Nintendo Switch.