Human Resource Machine | Wii U

---

Make no mistake about it, chums, this latest game from the folks at Tomorrow Corporation (Little Inferno, World of Goo) is a tad on the niche side. Whether you’ll be bald by the time you finish it will mostly depend on your powers of coding, and much more macabre, maths!

---

​By Rob Holt

---

​@acousticmagic

---

Platforms: Wii U, PC, Mac
Developer: Tomorrow Corporation
Publisher: Tomorrow Corporation
Players: 1

The game begins in a delightfully pedestrian way, as the first few years of your employment at the “company” focus on fairly basic puzzles, that even this donkey-brained dunce could solve. From there though, the difficulty ramps-up unimaginably, leaving you confused, often irritated, and eventually exhausted upon completion.

Using commands such as “jump”, “add” and “copyto” you’ll be tasked with moving a set of numbers from your inbox, into the outbox, in whatever fashion your boss requires. This could be a simply case of adding one number to another and then dumping the result in the outbox, but as you climb the corporate ladder the puzzles get ever harder, resulting in huge amounts of code.

Just like any good coder, you’ll be rewarded for keeping everything as boiled-down and efficient as possible. Each puzzle itself has extra objectives (resulting in two very satisfying green leds lighting up next to the level) tasking you with solving the problem in a certain amount of moves, for example. This is a great motivation to go back and work on your skills, something that would be great for any youngsters (or oldsters for that matter) interested in coding.

​As we’ve highlighted above though, towards the early-middle section the game becomes viciously hard, as you are tasked with multiplying without a multiplication tool, and solving such complex equations that you often forget where you are. Using the “jump”, “jump if zero” and “jump if negative” tools you’ll navigate your ever denser pieces of code, and it’s here where the game makes you feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. You might figure out how to solve a certain aspect of the code, but when you start work on the next you’ll completely forget where you were, and this can be very draining. Those of you with coding experience, or grand maths skills (that GCSE B grade feels woefully inept now…) will love playing the game to its conclusion, others may well replicate their school years and copy from an online “boffin”.

The visual look of the game is a real treat, with a dull palette of greys for the corporate buildings, to the brown walls of the office, to the delightful purple and green dresses of your fellow employees drinking coffee. Every five or six puzzles - or year of employment - you’ll be given the chance to have a drink, or even take a beach holiday. It’s a wonderful send-up of the corporate world, culminating in the thinning of your hair and robots replacing your boss. The music also fits the action perfectly, from lightly brushed jazz drums and organs to more sinister electronic pieces.

If you’re a fan of puzzle games, or games with a dark, quirky sense of humour we’d definitely recommend Human Resource Machine. Likewise if you’re a wannabe programmer, this is a great place to start. I'd personally love to see Tomorrow Corporation sell this game to education providers, as it would be a great way to get younger people interested in programming. Ultimately though, it just might be too frustrating for a lot of us older, and clearly not wiser, folks (this donkey-brain included!). 

Pros

• A huge challenge
• Achieving all the extra objectives will take non-mathematical geniuses ages
• Art style is fun and quirky
• Music is a good fit for the action
• Sends up big corporations beautifully with hilarious cut-scenes and interactions
• Makes an excellent educational tool

Cons

• Enormous difficulty curve easily leads to frustration
• Easy to get confused when coding, also leading to frustration
• Won’t appeal to many

Score
7/10