Shenzhen I/O Review

The fourth in a series of Zachtronics reviews. Start with the SpaceChem one if you're seeing these for the first time. Links below.

[crozraven]

This game is a literal job for some people in electronics.

[Andrew-jwvc]

Zach is an incredible genius being able to develop so many varied games that have insanely deep levels of challenges. I haven't finished any of them, but I have played almost all of them, and I love them so much. I doubt I'll ever be able to finish SpaceChem, but I'm on the final challenges of TIS-100 I think, and Opus Magnum is accessible enough that I believe I'll finish it someday. Shenzhen is a bit of a different beast, and I haven't played much of it because of that, but I also regard it as insanely well made and I love that Zachtronics is putting out games like this.

[salokin]

You're probably the only "large" gaming channel that covers obscure gaming like this
It makes me love you even more

[Mouse_Librarian]

The amount of people that criticize the fact that these reviews aren't generic zelda or mario games for the umpteenth time physically upset me. There are plenty of people with zero personality that exist on youtube to reinforce your opinion on those games.

Even as a fellow programmer, these games do not appeal to me either, but to borderline insult him based on reviewing games that he wants to instead of what you tell him makes you a terrible person. Grow some goddamn manners.

[Ryan-ypfc]

I'm so fascinated by your series of videos about games like this, because I have absolutely no interest in playing games like this. Seems like way more work than fun. But I like seeing what you enjoyed about it and what you found interesting

[huffee]

absolutely love shenzhen i/o, one of my favourite puzzle games, though looking at the comment section, i can see why people don't bother covering stuff like this, what a mess.
that said i agree with pretty much all your points, this video made me want to try solving the cold storage bot again, i've been stuck there for a long time and i haven't tried in months

[JonnyHyperbole]

I have absolutely no idea what I'm watching.

[atomicdiscogirl]

These games definitely don’t interest me, but I am very glad that he is covering them. If he didn’t, then who else would? At least this series is providing something a little different than the rest of the extremely oversaturated youtube analysis community.

[MitchellHammond]

Matthew and Zachtronics games is like Guts and the boat.

[SchmidtP]

I just love the format of your reviews. They're what *real* reviews used to be like, with thought out sections and a conclusion that isn't boiled down to a single sentence, but wraps all the important parts up to few thoughts that are easy to understand and remember. The Zachtronics games aren't for me, but the reviews are enjoyable in themselves.

[DarkestOneful]

That pronunciation of конструктор gets me every time =) (btw, it's "constructor" in russian)

[dgmetalhead]

This is my first time looking at these comments and it was a mistake.

[a_grin_without_a_cat]

I'm pretty much not into puzzle games, but I like you are talking about them. Actually, I want to give Shenzhen and Infinifactory a try after watching this series of videos. Thank you for your work.

[myvanwycalista]

Holy shit. This is exactly the kind of game that I was looking for. I know that CynicalBrit covered a similar one a while ago that I can't find right now, but this is perfect. Thanks a lot! :D

[panamanian]

Thanks for these reviews, Matt.

I was never exposed to these games and I'm unlikely to play them, but I've learned a lot about a part of gaming that I was largely unaware of.

[Csaboka]

Welcome to the club of Kelp Harvester survivors! This difficulty wall in the middle of the second campaign is definitely an issue with the difficulty curve, but the puzzle couldn't be moved because of the story. The original version of the puzzle was even harder, but it was changed twice during Early Access to manage the difficulty, with limited success.

Minor nit: you don't need NEG because you can do "mul -1" now.

[Maldito]

Can't wait for the Opus Magnum review! :D My favorite game so far!

[artey]

I initially was disappointed that Shenzhen just continues the assembly programming of TIS. I appreciate TIS for what it is, but the theme of SpaceChem probably hooked me the most about that game. Having two programming games in a row just seems really excessive to me. However, I think that Shenzhen, which I sometimes call TIS-200, also brings enough new stuff to the table to make it worthwile. Different parts, prices, layouts and connections of pins are all things that weren't possible in TIS. I think your criticism at 3:28 is that cheap solutions can also be the easiest or most elegant, but I don't see a problem with that. I think this surprising application of the DX300 is unintuitive enough to reward a good solution.

Your suggestion at 10:32 also doesn't really make sense to me. Of course, storing a container and retrieving it immediately afterwards seems unnecessarily complicated, but in practice you wouldn't be able to tell whether another container will get stored before the other one gets retrieved. I also would like outputs to be less strictly defined, but then Shenzhen would be a different game.

By the way, I'm writing this comment much later because the second half of the campaign was way too hard for me. I then replayed SpaceChem and managed to beat every single level and get all achievements. I'm proud I did that. It only took about four years.

So then I went back to Shenzhen, got a little further and hit a brick wall again. Yes, it's kelp harvesting. I usually don't watch a video of yours without having beaten the game in question, but in this case I really didn't care. (And just in case: I don't want anybody to give me a hint for kelp harvesting. I either want it to solve myself or never at all.) It's somewhat relieving to see that I'm not the only one who had massive problems with it, but of course it still bugs me. That said, I did manage to beat "Would you believe it?", which was insane as well. Anyway, you have my respect for beating it.

I agree that non-blocking inputs are overutilised. They can be helpful but often they are just a bit annoying. I'm sure many people have already told you, but you can negate the accumulator by multiplying it with -1. A horizontal bridge also seems rather pointless to me. But yeah, the swap command would have been a nice addition. And the outputs of the puzzle at 15:44 are indeed needlessly complicated. I have the impression that Zach just went way overboard with the difficulty of the puzzles in the second half in general.

Anyway, as much as I like Shenzhen, I think I will take another break from it.

[monkiemonA]

Everyone needs to understand that if Matt wasn't making videos he wanted to do, these videos would be substantially worse. Think about it, do you really want the MGS4 of matthewmatosis videos?

[JuanPerez-bdoz]

Man, I don't know how many hours I've put into this game.

Sometimes I even play the programming circuits stuff.