A third game? What is this madness?!
Given that I’m a software engineer, it’s a bit weird to play programming games. Of course, 7 Billion Humans isn’t really that much like my job, even if it activates the same part of my brain. The programming puzzles on offer here are paired with a charming, wacky aesthetic and a dystopian narrative about machines taking over all tasks and humans being desperate for work. Your job is to provide instructions for your poor humans, which they will then follow faithfully, even at the expense of their own safety.
7 Billion Humans reminds me heavily of Human Resource Machine, an earlier game by the same creator. At this point, it’s been long enough since I’ve played either that I couldn’t tell you what the difference is – for what it’s worth, though, I think I liked this game more.
Friends, I never finished 7 Billion Humans – and if you know me well you’ll be able to guess why. The game provides you with a set of optimization criteria for each level, and I felt an unnatural compulsion to complete every single one of them. This led to me agonizing over slight improvements and crazy reorganizations of my solutions until I was completely burnt out and gave up on it entirely. I’ll try not to do this again, but no promises.
I’ll hopefully report back soon – this is the first game on my list that I’ve actually been looking forward to.
WilyEngineer 