#human resource machine

[videogamepolls]

Have you played Human Resource Machine (2015)?

Yes

No

I watched someone play it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onMar 23, 2025

Requested by anon

[cthulhubert]

There are a lot of old jokes about people who program for a living and then code at home as a hobby. I don't actually do much of that, but I do play plenty of programming-esque puzzle games (eg, everything by ZachTronics). Fun challenges without the arbitrary difficulties imposed by figuring out how some fucking API works or explaining things to clients.

I picked up Human Resource Machine many many years ago, completed (including optional optimization challenges) 38 or so levels in about 20 hours of playtime before getting stymied trying to optimize the last three, then ran out of juice.

It's pretty fun, basically you make little drag and drop assembly programs that your character follows to transform a given input into a specified output. It's by the Tomorrow Corporation, most famous, I think for World of Goo. So it's a really cute, surreal experience.

Finally picked it up again last weekend. Went through the same amount in about ten hours, and finally finished, with every achievement, after a few more. I admit it, after I got the prime factorization speed challenge, I finally just looked up how people were doing the size one. Had to kick myself for missing the obvious trick. I also looked up hints for the speed challenge on "digit exploder" (separately output the digits of the input 1 to 3 digit number, no leading zeroes), because I thought there might be some more clever trick than just a fully unrolled program, but nope. My 125 behemoth cleared it handily (though obviously isn't record setting; I got 138 steps; somebody has a 126 command 119 steps entry).

Those two (optional side levels) had actually stopped me from even trying the final level last time, so I was surprised when my first attempt beat both challenges.

Still in the mood for puzzles, so I might move straight on to the sequel (7 Billion Humans; apparently parallel programming inspired), or try out some more Zachtronics games, like SHENZHEN I/O or TIS-100.

[toodles-doff]

here's a small piece of fan art for a game that makes my brain feel equally as small

[rocketlanterns]

So I just replayed through Human Resource Machine for the first time since 2017, and I do gotta say, having the extra 7 years of experience in programming and algorithms has made the game significantly easier compared to how I remember it being back then.

It probably also helps having a lot of experience in more zachlikes too since it turns out a few levels can be cheesed in quite funny ways.

Two notable ones is that in the level where you are expected to follow a linked list, it looks like you can cheese it by just reading the inputs and hard coding the outputs, but then it breaks for being not robust and sends you a configuration with the inputs flipped. So I extended my hard coded cheese to handle this other case, and it turns out that the puzzle only actually has two test cases (basically, if inbox = 0 outbox "ESCAPEAPE" else outbox "APEESCAPE")

And in the last level, where you have to sort a list, turns out if you just implement a relatively well written insertion sort, you just get both of the goal requirements with a good 10-20% margin to spare.

Thanks @oshisaure for getting me to play this again <3

[duchhh]

Ta-da!! Behold~

My human-resource-machine sona✨️

[spewagepipe]

Spewage Litmus: Human Resource Machine

Human Resource Machine feels like the abandoned (albeit well-made) first act of a much larger game. The plot gestures at themes of corporate dehumanization and wilful ignorance of catastrophe that go mostly undeveloped, and the programming puzzles feel very much like it would be possible to graduate on to some higher level of abstraction that never appears. What exists feels great, but perhaps unambitious. 

APPROVED

[tinysamm]

The vast majority of the screen in Human Resource Machine is used for feedback, as the player is largely interacting via the command box on the right. However, in setting the game up in this way, the player’s actions can be simplified to an abstract representation more easily, and the effects of their actions can be seen in stark detail on the left.

[nintendocafe]

World of Goo, Little Inferno, and Human Resource Machine all arrive on Nintendo Switch in North America Thursday, March 16!