I actually went into Human Resource Machine blind and did not realise that it's a series of assembly programming assignments.

Assembly.

No flexible ifs.

No while/for.

Just jump. Or jump-ifs.

I felt the full irony of teaching students to do fundamental programming questions in my day job, then coming home to do programming assignments myself in a game.

The game is surprisingly accurate at emulating how a computer work. The levels are also well-scaffolded in terms of teaching programming concepts; I know because some of these levels are similar programming questions I ask students at my day job, especially the prime number one hehe. I was also pleasantly surprised to see null terminated strings. I wonder how many programmers out there know what they are?

One thing I was truely impressed by is that you can't solve just one sequence of inputs. The game somehow manages to figure out that sometimes, my algorithm would not work in all cases. It does hint that they do have some kind of an interpreter for the code I write which they can run some tests in the background.

I do think the theme is very cute, that I am just an employee following instructions, climbing the corperate building and finally rewarded by being replaced by computers.

It's a theme that I can emphathize, interestingly enough. A lot of my career has been about automation, writing tools and eventually replacing myself so that I can do other more exciting things. I honestly did not know that this would be seen as a threat to others until someone in Japan once told me "then what is the person going to do once you automate this".

I had fun.

7/10!