SHENZHEN IO

SHENZHEN I/O is Zachtronics' assembly-language and electronics-design puzzle game, set at the fictional Shenzhen Longteng Electronics Co., Ltd. (深圳龙腾科技有限公司) where you've just taken a job designing increasingly intricate consumer electronics for clients who don't always know what they want. The premise hands you a board, a budget, a parts catalogue and a specification — and a manual that you are entirely expected to read.

The core gameplay involves building circuits from a variety of components from different fictional manufacturers — microcontrollers, memory chips, logic gates, LCD screens, sensors — and writing code in a compact assembly language where every instruction can be conditionally executed. The constraints are tight: each microcontroller has limited memory, limited line counts, limited registers, and each board has limited space and budget. The puzzle is fitting a working solution into the available envelope while keeping the wiring sane.

The in-game manual is the central design conceit. More than thirty pages of original datasheets, reference guides and technical diagrams sit alongside the puzzles, and the game expects you to consult them constantly. The colourful supporting cast of your colleagues at Longteng provides narrative texture between projects, with email exchanges and corporate dynamics that read very much like the real-world Shenzhen electronics scene. A sandbox mode lets you design and test your own games and devices, and a built-in solitaire game gives you something to do when engineering proves harder than expected.