A 2018 hacking puzzle game where you learn to code by reading a magazine like it's 1997 (zachtronics.com)
Zachtronics' EXAPUNKS makes you write stripped-down assembly to infiltrate systems, taught through TRASH WORLD NEWS, a fictional hacker zine printed inside the game. Commenters credit it with curing their fear of low-level code.
The nostalgia came with a news hook: Zachtronics stopped making games, but Zach Barth is back under a new studio, Coincidence Games, with a spacecraft-engineering puzzler already out. And the design lesson players keep relearning: solve first, optimize second — pre-optimizing is futile.
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