EXAPUNKS just doesn’t make it feel as interesting as it could, and I wish there was something more that tied me to the feeling of helplessness the game wanted to present. This is just an opportunity that’s lost, but the idea that I’m hacking my own body to make myself better sounded amazing and had a lot of potential. There are also points where your vision is injured, and again you don’t have any negative repercussions from this. The player is easily able to code, without any problems. The game talks about not having control of your (left?) arm, but you never see it or feel it. You will use your EXAs to cure you of pieces of the Phage, but the problem is it’s curing things you’re not experiencing. The problem though is much of the game is built on this and it’s an interesting idea, but it’s never explored or made real inside the game itself. The game is sold on Steam with the promise that you not only hack computers but hack your body, and the reason you need to is you have this disease called the Phage. The player has it and it’s supposed to be affecting his body. That’s a somewhat minor complaint, the other complaint is that the game talks about this Phage disease which is a major plot point. And yet we don’t have OCR for companies or it’s cheaper to have humans do it? Maybe even have the player forced to look at a failed OCR to find mistakes so they could fix an issue with the data entry rather than doing data entry that we’ve had for a couple of decades if not more. We have EXAs in this world, which are extremely tiny robots that can do anything even hack the human body. The work the player is doing is rather odd as well. Throw the player in after having done 6998 of these, so they earn the 700 dollars for medicine they needed, and then they realize they have to start over for the next payment and start the story there. I realize people would hate to do ten or twenty of them, but maybe two or three would work. However, you only do a single receipt, so you don’t get to feel the weight of the drudgery. This is the beginning of the game, and you’re doing the OCR for money. My biggest issue is that you don’t feel like you are in trouble. The drugs aren’t available right now and their price is going to skyrocket soon most likely, so you’re in trouble. The story of the game starts by giving you the option of better and faster ways to earn money, to get drugs that you need for your sickness. It’s not a bad section and I like the idea that “there’s not a lot of ways to earn money” but there are a couple of major issues I have at this point of the game. It’s literally doing what Optical Character Recognition (OCR) already does for money, and it’s one of the few parts of the game where a big opportunity is missed. You then start by typing in a receipt from an executive for their expense report. You first meet someone named Nivas offering to get you drugs for your disease. As such, I feel like this is an Early Access game I’m willing to review properly, and I don’t think the game looks worse for it.Īs you start EXAPUNKS, it’s a little weird. Patches are coming and fixes are being made, but the main game is complete. I normally avoid Early Access unless I have to play something for Humble Monthly Bundle, but for the fact that EXAPUNKS, as it stands, is fully playable and I’d call it close to finished. They are still working on minor fixes and getting community feedback, which they certainly have gotten. I still remember when EXAPUNKS was announced, I saw just the letters “Zach” based and got excited, so was that excitement warranted?īefore we really dive in, I will say, this is an Early Access game, however, Zachtronics has published it as a Beta, in which the game is fully completable and should have almost no bugs. I’ve owned every game he’s put out on Steam. There’s something about Zach Barth’s games that make me really excited to play them. Zachtronics is my spirit animal of the video game industry.
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