Human Resource Machine
Warning: this game contains math and hard thinking. Wait, come back, it’s really good!
$4.99 Developer Tomorrow Corporation, tomorrowcorporation.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later
Some people love logic puzzles. They love the way they can feel their brain working, the cogs grinding and crunching until the answer pops out at the end. They love to look at the result and see the workings they made to get to that point, and it makes them feel smug and self-satisfied and smart. This reviewer is one of those people.
Human Resource Machine is the latest game from the mad scientists at Tomorrow Corporation. The studio, founded in 2010, specializes in experiences that range from the depressingly nihilistic dystopia in Little Inferno – a game about setting fire to all of your possessions – to this one, which is… well, also a depressingly nihilistic dystopia. But this time it’s in an office – which pretty much embodies that description.
It’s a logic game, but a logic game in the purest sense of the word, as it asks you to perform mundane tasks - take numbered box from Inbox, put it in Outbox - with different iterations and objectives each time, according to what is essentially simplified computer programming. One, for example, asks that you only put zeroes in the outbox. Another wants you to put the largest of every two numbers in the outbox, and discard the others.
The way you do this is with commands - just like computer code, you see - that start off as simple as “go to inbox” and “go to outbox” and gradually get more complicated, such as “jump if negative to…” and addition and subtraction commands. Pure logic.
But it can take a fairly specific type of person to enjoy this kind of logic. Someone with no knowledge of programming but a good grasp of math might love it, but someone with neither of those things might be curled up in a ball weeping by level five. Or maybe you’ll love it anyway – it’s just logic, after all!
Human Resource Machine is weirdly fun, fascinating, and so satisfying when it clicks, if a little confusingly worded for the average player with no programming experience at all. Rewards such as extra marks for elegant (short and smart) coding add a little frisson of competition for more experienced players, but for those that enjoy the ride, not the speed, there’s still an interesting plot to follow behind the whole game.
the bottom line. Brainhurtingly taxing at times, incredibly rewarding when the logic finally clicks - but steer well clear if you hate math.