The Signal State Reviews

a shorter version of SHENZHEN I/O with simpler puzzles but decent (but short) story and great sounddesign.

This game gave me the bravery to attempt signal related electronics IRL again. Plus I like the direction the plot takes :). My only critique is that I need more rack space for notes when I get confused, and later levels it becomes quite limited (would be nice to have simple skinny rack below each rack for simple masking tape style labels). Thanks for the great teaching tool that made it fun!

Good game. Puzzles don't have much connection to the scenarios in the stories but are well constructed. There is some pretty uneven difficulty in the game. A couple levels in the midgame were extremely difficult, with the rest of the game being quite simple in comparison which was a bit of an anticlimax.

I love logic games. I hate it when I can't figure out how to solve them. I love that I hate them.

Rocksmith for Modular Synthesizers I paid A LOT more (factor of 10 or even 100) for less educative tools/courses about modular sound synthesis.

A fun Zach-inspired game where you solve SHENZHEN I/O-style puzzles, but instead of writing code you wire modular synthesizer-type machines together to manipulate currents. It's a different feel, but it works! If you're catching it on sale, it's definitely worth picking up.

This is a competent puzzler from a small team on their first outing, but a more nuanced review would say "recommended with reservations." I really want to see the next game from this team, because this one's an ambitious near-miss. This game has a lot of visual appeal. The modular-synth-inspired interface is fun to poke at. The audio cue of hearing your output data as you run it is charming. Unfortunately, there are a few subtle ways it misses: For most of the game, puzzles have an arbitrarily restricted set of modules, often missing ones that have already been introduced. It feels to me like the designers are trying to force players toward particular solutions at the cost of others, and I think that's a mistake. Part of the charm of this style of engineering game is building your own version of the solution, janky as it may be, and then trying to improve it to hit the benchmarks you can see other players have hit. The player stats are another miss. The choice to show the worst isn't especially helpful - in a complex system it's always possible to introduce more unnecessary wires - and the choice to show only the best instead of an average or percentile score means that the "benchmark" metrics for puzzles don't feel like a target. Many of the leaderboards show values that are inconcievably efficient under the base game constraints, and I end up unsure whether they're solves from unrestricted play, or values that got into the dataset incorrectly through bugs or intentional cheats. The last reservation mostly only affects folks who have prior experience with modular synths, but since that's the core conceit here it ends up frustrating me. The game's model of processing is fundamentally unlike modular synthesis. Coming at the problems with the intuitions built by playing with a more accurate synth simulator (say, VCV Rack) will have you thinking in terms of continuous feedback cycles. The modules here are discrete, with an underlying system-clock pulsing along under everything. While the game encourages you to feed things back on themselves, it also considers most feedback systems to be "infinite loops" and halts execution. I'd love to see another crack at this metaphor that takes a look at how other existing simulations of modular synths handle it. There's an interesting engineering game to be made using the analog, fuzzy world of real synths, but this game's heart is digital and quantized. Still, reservations standing, there's a lot I liked here. I played through the game to the end - even though I had to skip some of the optional puzzles when I couldn't find a solution that fit the tools I was being given. I had a good time doing it, And it's inspired me to poke at more accurate modular synths again, to make some music. But I'd still love to solve some puzzles on those synths, too.

[h1]A valiant Zachtronics derivative puzzler with a very steep difficulty curve, could scratch that Zach itch if you have enough patience. [/h1] You probably ended up here because after the closure of Zachtronics you've been looking for something to fill that void. Maybe you're still a little sad about the closure. Maybe you sort of blame yourself for letting that candle go out on your Zach shrine and that's why they shut down. No, of course you don't. That's... that would be crazy. Where was I? Right. Signal State is more than Zach-similar, it's an expansion of one of the games in Zach's last outing, 20th Century Food Court. So if you liked that one, read on. And if that one made you tear your hair out and curse the very existence of fast food, maybe give this one a pass. [h2]Bring machinery back to life![/h2] It's a big restoration job, and it's yours. [h3]An intriguing post-apocalyptic techno-puzzle game [/h3] So, the technopocalypse happened. Whoops! Every machine called it quits at the same time and we don't know why. What we do know is that society fell a pretty long way, but we're trying to rebuild now. That's where you come in. You're given a farm to bring back to operation. This involves getting its machinery - some simple, some fiendishly complex - back online. You will get to watch changes happen to your farm (not in great detail but you'll see some progress). Your tasks will get more and more complex. Your paycheck will not change. (You don't get paid.) [h3]Edutainment in obscure technology [/h3] Most people have never worked with Programmable Logic Controllers. This game seeks to end that. This isn't a programming puzzle game; this is more of a modular logic system sim - in other words, PLCs. If you played 20th Century Food Court in Zachtronics' Last Chance BBS, you've played this game in a lot of ways. This one goes deeper and has a greater scope, but the overall feel and gameplay are very, very similar. That's not to mean this isn't fun or unoriginal, mind. They just cover the same basic technology. [h3]Varied puzzles, and lots of them [/h3] There are mandatory "main quest" puzzles to handle, and scads of optional ones. Just like you'd expect, the optional ones hand you some pretty thorny problems to fix and you do get a nice dopamine bump when you do, but you don't really [i]gain[/i] anything for all the extra work. Unlock a new part early? Nope. But hey... dopamine. [h2]Curse machinery as you try to bring it back to life![/h2] Yeah, this job might make you headbutt a brick wall. [h3]Learning cliff [/h3] You've heard of a learning curve? This game is a learning cliff. Actually, it's a lot of them, one after another. The game is a succession of being thrown head-first into one after another. Although early puzzles sort of build into one another, cultivating a knowledge base and then expanding on it, once you're past the middle of Act I or so, the difficulty level goes up [u]rapidly.[/u] "Hey, you learned clock modules and how to string them together to make compound signals! Way to go! Now figure out how to solve this clock problem that doesn't resemble anything you've done before and that your previous solutions cannot apply to." Frustration is an inescapable part of this game, and while some frustration is good - it fuels a feeling of achievement - at times this game seems to enjoy your discomfort and confusion a little too much. [h3]Odd design choices [/h3] There are some things the developers did that honestly make no real sense. For example: as you run a test on your build, the output is mapped to musical notes. Whatever the output value is determines the note played. Except it's not [i]music[/i]. It's a cat walking across a piano. It's random, it's unpleasant, and [i]you can't disable it.[/i] Do you want to run an incremental test to see if your subsystem is working? Then be prepared to hear an assault of [b]blerp-blerp-blerp-blerp[/b] "you were wrong" tones. I ended up disabling the game's sound simply because not only did it not contribute to gameplay, it actively made it unpleasant. [h3]ENOUGH WITH THE DISCORD [/h3] Yeah, we get it, you have a Discord. Congratulations. It's not an achievement. [b]Stop putting the link everywhere in the game.[/b] I give you no credit for having one, I give you no credit for offloading your bug reports or what should be in a help file on it. Seeing it again and again is annoying, not helpful. [h1]The Bottom Line[/h1] If you're really going into Zachtronics withdrawal, Signal State is a good way to slake that thirst provided you still have your Zach frustration callouses. They're going to get a workout here. But the puzzle design is solid, the mechanics are solid - Signal State is a good game. Just keep an eye on your blood pressure and make sure you're getting enough sleep.

Wouldn't recommend it as a game. It's more like a synthesizer simulator — a software. I don't have an actual synthesizer, but I've always been interested in experimenting with one. This game allows me to do just that and learn the basics, and I'm really liking it. The story is presented in the form of text-based dialogues, but I don't find it engaging. It feels slightly bland and generic. Doesn't ruin the gameplay though; just doesn't really add much to it. You can skip the dialogues if you want to. The story is probably there for the sake of making the game more approachable and somewhat easier to digest. It also introduces a use case for each project. Not the best game for chilling. Even with the hints the game provides, some of the tasks could be challenging. So, beware! The game demands sustained focus and patience for long periods of time, if you wish to do the tasks on your own without relying on walkthroughs online.

I bought this because I've played a lock of zachtronics games, enjoyed them, and it looked like an interesting zachtronics like puzzler. If you've played a lot of games like this, I don't think you'll enjoy this one. I only managed to get through act 1 before the tedium got to me. I couldn't figure out how to skip dialog, most of the puzzles are straightforward tutorials, and those that actually require thinking a little bit are still really easy. That, and none of the puzzles I'd encountered were really that different from something you'd do in Shenzhen IO, which is definitely what this game most resembles. Yes, you're using modules instead of instructions, so it's more parallel, but the type of input/output logic isn't that different, and the instructions in Shenzhen IO aren't that different than the modules. Also, the music is neat in places, but for me it was a bad combination of interesting and repetitive that got old fast. Most games like this have really repetitive music, but it's usually easy to let it fade into the background. I wouldn't say this is the case, here. It's also annoying that the signals you output make musical sound, but the soundtrack goes right on through it, and the two do not harmonize, or even match tempo.