It’s another Zachtronics game, which can only mean a seemingly complex, but satisfyingly simple puzzle game about coding that’ll make you feel like some kind of genius who should actually be holding the UN to ransom instead of sat in their pajamas in the middle of the day, or is that just me?

(Obviously there may be some mild solutions to some of the puzzles in the various screenshots in the review, but also don’t worry about it)

EXAPUNKS (Which I believe is an abbreviation for Exciting Xylophone Audio Producing Unique New Kink Systems) is a game all about hacking, but if hacking were like in a terrible movie from the 90s, where everyone wears aviator shades even though they’re in doors and also in the dark, and not like actual hacking, which I assume is very boring and also a crime.

Working has never been so easy, ignoring the time spent working this out

You’re some bedroom bound individual who has sadly come down with the phage, a disease that hopes to convey its deadliness exclusively through its name, and have to once again return the land of hacking in order to pay for doses of medication. Thankfully you’re not expected to just know how to program and hack from the get go as a friendly man will come to your house and give you a printable zine all about hacking and bank security systems and the like. Not your actual house, obviously, your in game house. Although, someone could come to your actual house and give it to you if you don’t have a printer, I guess.

You also happen to make friends with some form of advanced AI that lives in your computer and has a penchant for changing road signs and restaurant review ratings. Don’t ask, I don’t think it’s ever explained.

That’s as far as it goes in terms of anything close to a story, like many other Zachtronics games it’s somewhat light on any major narrative, but what you’re mainly here for is the in-depth puzzle solving. EXAPUNKS isn’t any different and does an incredible job at teaching you how to tackle the various puzzles, except in a very hands off way that can also lead to issues much further down the line.

Speaking of hands, you also have your own body, it’s odd

There’s a unique coding language in EXAPUNKS that uses simple commands to tell your EXAs, little digital robots, to do a certain action upon something. “GRAB 300” will grab make your robot grab anything labelled “300”, “LINK 800” will make your robot move along the labelled pathway and “COPY F X” copies the value highlighted in the held file, F, to the EXAs own internal memory, X. Each line is a beat in the machine and you’ll begin to write lines and lines ordering your tiny little crab-bots into war. Digital war.

Along with various means of testing values against other values, you’ll begin writing increasingly complicated scripts to solve increasingly complicated puzzles, all while constantly referring back to your hacking zine, either to read about a certain command once again or to read about how a particular system works for a certain level.

An example would be learning how modems work and how you can dial into and then eventually disconnect through the game’s systems. You have to design your codes to be future proof, and often leave no trace you were ever there, so your scripts have to be vague and generic, which adds a certain level of complexity to everything as it’s never as simple as just telling the system to type in a phone number, the phone number is different every time, you need to tell your robots how to read and send the phone number across and then tell one crab-bot to pick up a specific file and then change a specific value.

Like many other Zachtronics games you’ll spend good chunks of time staring at a stationary screen, furiously typing away trying to mentally work out what will happen and getting the order of proceedings all squared away and the amount of the game that actually involves any movement is about a single minute as EXAPUNKS blasts through 100 simulations of the process. From an outside point of view this would look terribly dull and boring, but there’s something innately absorbing about EXAPUNKS, and any other Zachtronics game, that will have you pealing your eyes away from your screen, red and dehydrated, to realise it’s far too late into the evening as you’ve spent a substantial amount of time trying to make a fictional road sign say a funny message.

It may look like impenetrable code, but… I think I know what I wrote?

There truly is something to be said about how impressively approachable a number of the puzzles in EXAPUNKS are. It could easily be completely overwhelming trying to wrap your head around an entire, and fictional, coding language and bend it to your will, but even with enough brute forcing you can make your way through most puzzles. You may not land on the scoreboard, but you solved it, eventually. Not to mention that as you’re typing everything in manually, there is a personal sense of gratification that comes forward. You feel like the code you’ve spewed into the game is your own, your solution that you worked out yourself and it feels great. You end up feeling smarter than you probably have any right to be. Maybe you should write that you’re “computer literate” on your CV and use this game as the reference. Would that be mad?

Sure, trying to explain anything of what you’ve done to anyone in real life will immediately make you feel like some kind of moron as they edge further away from you and steadily reach for the door, but at least in the wee hours of the night, you’ll feel proud of yourself as you give out a hefty exhale and hit the play button and watch everything go as planned.

The genuine sense of pride I had when I managed to just know what to do on this level. It feels good.

That’s not to say that EXAPUNKS is without flaws. A major flaw of the game is the theme. Not the crunchy 90s hacker aesthetic, including over the top opening title music, but instead the nitty gritty of the game. The problems you’re solving are all about code at the end of the day and it can be a lot harder to wrap your head around than anything else. Unlike Opus Magnum, the best Zachtronics game, which is entirely about rotating and pushing about physical space, you can’t easily mentally work out how things will move, because it’s just crab-bots filing through data and sending data and processing data.

The time spent slaving away at your screen to create some solution to a puzzle is also somewhat undone when all you get to watch is a simple crab-bot move into a room, then stand still for hours as it is actually doing very complex data sorting, but otherwise it is stationary and doing nothing.

There are times where not really understanding a certain command can also lead you to a solid brick wall and that’s that. I personally haven’t finished the game as I hit a level near the very end that I’m fairly certain requires me to use the “TEST MRD” command, but I don’t fully know what it does or how it works and now I guess I can never get any further. Even looking up information doesn’t really explain anything. No matter how much I flick through the various zines at my disposal all I can find information on is how banks encrypt data in this fictional universe, but no information on what certain commands do in a way that my brain could understand.

It’s not the most enthralling to watch.

You can very much hit your limit with EXAPUNKS. You could easily hit a point where you just have to accept that the puzzle is too hard and your hacking adventure ends there. In something like Opus Magnum you could at least brute force an elaborate rotating monstrosity to get past the level, it may not have looked good, but at least it was a solution, here in EXAPUNKS it’s a lot harder to wrap your brain hole around what’s actually happening because it’s more about the logical and internal magic of computers, and not just swinging big colourful balls around. While you’ll feel like an incredible genius a lot of the time, there will come a point where you’re just stuck with defeat and feel like the dumbest idiot in the digi-verse.

EXAPUNKS is still a strong addition to the Zachtronics library. A puzzle game that presents itself with a depth of complexity, but has a surprisingly forgiving learning curve that leaves you feeling smart and intelligent, at least until you hit the sudden drop and start drowning in code and crab-bots.