KnotBot Reviews

Absolutely adorable! It lets me experiment with coding logic without having to learn code, and the puzzles really made me think. The music and sound effects add to the wholesome aesthetic of it too!

I'd rate this neutral if I could, but alas steam won't let me. To be concise: Atm it's a short but lovely game with a few bugs. [strike]One of the bugs won't let you replay the same level twice, which is a bit of a shame if you want to get a golden sock/perfect score on a level. I've also counted two of the levels where it seems impossible to get a golden sock/perfect score on (one of which requires you complete the level in 6 moves by moving four apples around. Picking up and dropping off one apple takes two actions).[/strike]* The biggest downside of this game, I'd say, is that it only takes a single digit number of hours to complete all the levels, so only buy this if you're okay with getting that for the asking price. *EDIT: Bug has since been fixed, and upon replaying these two levels, I found them to be beatable.

Equal parts cute and challenging! A fantastic entry from the team at BeetBomb! 100% recommended if you like puzzle games, lack of coding/programming experience need not to put you off.. ..just put your normal logic solving hat on and you should do just fine! Super satisfying when you finally complete a puzzle you've been stuck on, and the added 'Golden Sock' goals gives some replayability to the puzzles.

This is a fun little state-machine programming game. It's not very challenging, but then it's probably not meant to be so that's fine. But there's not a lot of content (levels) here so I'd recommend waiting for a good sale. If player-made levels become an option then that would likely add enough value to this title to make it worth full price.

This game scratches the surface of programming puzzle games in a simple but approachable manner. It's not very difficult for those aware of the logic necessary to get through the puzzles, but for those children and uninitiated among us, I think it is a very smartly designed game that could teach the basics of programming and how to think about logic. In particular, the game has Golden Sock challenges that reward players for not taking unnecessary actions For several of the puzzles in this game, it's easily possible to complete levels with some amount of inelegance - with your character jumping into walls or picking up unnecessary things. I imagine a kid figuring all this out would feel like a genius after the fact, especially with that final level. I don't think I'd recommend it for veterans of the genre, and I would say it is a tad too expensive, but otherwise, it's probably worth a shot.

KnotBot is a very interesting and approachable take on a genre that is slowly gaining attraction: programming puzzles. It does so by replacing the uninviting "whiles" and "ifs" with digestible symbols - arrows, threads and controllers - and by handing the player only a few pieces at a time. Each level has a unique objective, and the solution is up to the player's skills and creativity. [b]Gameplay:[/b] When it comes to raw gameplay, this game was quite relaxed. All I needed was a mouse. Never had to handle multiple different control types, inputs, panels, etc. The game was approachable and comfortable to play. The gameplay style is interesting in that planning/programming and playing/executing take place in the same environment/screen, so we never have to bother looking around or opening tabs. The capped grid size was also helpful in that I never had to manage tiles that were out of view, with the sole exception of the player's inventory. However, I have encountered several game-breaking bugs in my playtime. Be it physics bugs, gameplay inconsistencies, or just the game loading up the wrong assessment of tiles in a level. [b]Graphics:[/b] The graphics of this game are quite lovely. (Almost) everything fits in thematically: plushy, soft and hand-stitched. It's colorful without being distracting, and the overall style is cartoonish and simple without being crude or cheap. I did, however, find the level selection to be quite lacking in both details and in coherence. [b]Mechanics:[/b] The actual pieces of the puzzle were rather simple. While that was great for the first few levels, I felt a lack of dynamic functionality with them. For instance, the "use" and "attack" actions are mechanically the same, only with different contexts. The rotate piece, albeit useful and interesting in that it doesn't deal with the actual logic itself and rather the representation of actions, felt underexplored. Some more pieces could have been interesting to see, like perhaps a "for" piece with a preset or configurable number of uses, or a jump/double-move piece. [b]Puzzle Design and Difficulty Curve:[/b] The puzzles in this game were actually quite interesting in their variety, and the difficulty curve was surprisingly well-balanced, but I found that, for the most part, puzzles didn't really require much in terms of "thinking outside the box". I understand why that would be the case in the introductory levels, but a lot of late game levels were some variation of "distribute prop across a line". Be it planting seeds, giving apples or stacking pyramids, they all had similar mechanics and gameplays. I did, however, find the final puzzle rather interesting in how different from the rest of the puzzles it was. I knew the solution right away and managed to solve it on my first try, so to me it was on the "very easy" side, but more puzzles with that sort of "outside the box" mentality would have been quite fun to see. There was one puzzle in which I got stuck for a couple of days, but that was my own fault for assuming that what was actually the solution to the puzzle was somehow equal to a different approach that didn't solve the puzzle in the optimal number of steps. [b]Story:[/b] This game had none, which I quite appreciate, as I believe it would've distracted from the gameplay. [b]Music and Sound Effects:[/b] The music in this game was really good. Generally smooth and soft, fitting for thinking. However, at times, I did find it a tad distracting. For instance, the desert theme kept taking away my focus from the game. I do appreciate the separate sliders for volume and music, though! As for sound effects, some of them were quite complementary, while others were a bit loud and/or misplaced. [u][b]Overall Thoughts[/b][/u] In a broad sense, this game was good. It had an interesting premise, cute artwork, and a fun gameplay. But the reason why I'm marking this as "Not Recommended" is because, [u]in its current state[/u], the game ends up falling short. The game is overall very short, with few levels and few mechanics. The bugs I've encountered have made playing it either awkward or frustrating. The current price tag for it is, in my personal opinion, a tad high for what this game offers in terms of replayability. I do recommend buying this game if you can get it on a sale though, and I'd most certainly highly recommend it if we had some of those bugs fixed and maybe some new levels added. If this game had some sort of level editor then, I'd even pay extra! It's a very promising and engaging type of game with quite a lot of potential that I fear is unmet.

This is really the tutorial for the ten dollar version of this game that doesn't exist. It's an interesting implementation that appears like an attempt at combining programming with a physical space problem (your code blocks have to fit within a certain size box), but it's never really capitalized on. What is there is well polished and works well; you can even see the setup for combining various basic programming problems (pathfinding, towers of hanoi, etc.) into more complex solutions... but then you finish a level, get dumped out to the map and spend several minutes looking to see if you missed a path only to realize that you hit the end. No victory screen, just a map with nothing else to do. It's almost like the developer just got bored and threw the thing up there. $10 is way too much for this game, but if I try to come up with what I think is a fair price the answer is any amount is unfair; it's like paying for the first chapter of a book that never gets finished. Ultimately there are better options, some free, that provide a better experience. If you can find Manufactoria (if you can find it and get it running, yay Flash) is what this most felt like; Spacechem would probably be the second closest (and one you can actually buy and get running).

Though not a very long game for someone who has experience with coding, I think this is a great game for anyone who is looking for something educational for a child who has expressed interest in coding or engineering. The graphics are simple, but clean and cute, the gameplay is very straightforward and easy to get into, and the puzzles ramp up in challenge at a good pacing.

Very disappointing game ! When i saw it, I immediatly bought it : cute graphics + programming/puzzle ; that's everything I love ! But in the end : so few levels, finished everything in ~90 min... After like 5-8 tutorials levels, you get like 10-15 levels to "play" ! No complex programming structure (no internal memory mechanism, functions, ...) which means no complex / in depth levels.

Cute but ultimately very short, easy and limited. Nice graphics. Very few levels and mostly uninteresting challenges which don't have a clever solution. Expensive for what it is. Other games offer a lot more for a lot less.