Neotron Aims to Teach through Puzzle Adventure

Every now and then a game comes around that doesn’t just tell a story or entertain us, but enlightens us.

Every now and then a game comes around that doesn’t just tell a story or entertain us, but enlightens us. Developer Chris Johnson of Revolutionary Interactive has spent the last seven months working on Neotron , a puzzle adventure that hopes to teach players about electronic components as they play. While there is no current release window, there is a playable alpha with the first three levels available on the game’s website.

Neotron’s world is the circuitry of a quantum computer, with a dystopian atmosphere that evokes early levels of Bastion (sans the Narrator). Dim, neon walls and glowing circuit board floors are accompanied by a tense soundtrack as the tiny, player-controller spaceship putters around solving puzzles. Early levels include completing circuits by appropriately activating an assortment of four different logic gates according to their real-world properties; powering up 4-bit adders; and solving multiplexers which, from my understanding in the game, have multiple inputs but only one output. I’m not yet an expert on computer science, but I know more than I did before the demo.

“I’ve been trying to balance between the learning aspect of the game while still trying to keep it fun/exciting for the player,” Johnson says.

The game is obviously ambitious, with levels incorporating a stunning verticality later on. One level consists of decoding a seven segment indicator, and afterwards players can overlook the entire network of digital circuits behind the puzzle. It was astonishing not only the level of detail behind the puzzle, but also seeing how much goes behind a “simple” digital number.

The first two levels took me just over two hours to complete, but may be easier for those with more background in the science of it . A majority of my time was spent backtracking and thinking over my solutions, wishing I had a menu or some other display to indicate the extent of what one flip of a switch did, or at least draw out the situations/solutions. It felt like trial and error, and sometimes I had to teach myself not only the mechanics, but also the science. Neotron is still early in development however, and Johnson seems dedicated to keeping the game accessible; the most recent update added a companion drone to follow players and give them occasional location information.

Try Neotron for yourself at revolutionaryinteractive.comand you might just come out learned.