The Signal State

The Signal State is a logic puzzle game. Pretty much programming, but with signals, wires, and modules to manipulate those signals, instead of code. One could also call it a Zach-like, as it definitely carries a very familiar feel as Zachtronics games do, especially aesthetically and from the way the story is presented between each level. It also has a leaderboard for each level, incentivizing tidying up your solutions.

I love Zachtronics games, so naturally I thought I would like this, but sadly the level of quality in puzzle design just isn't there. One of the issues for me, personally, is that isn't really a programming game, nor even a general logic puzzle game. It seems to focus quite heavily on specific signal processing knowledge, which I don't have. Perhaps it's less of a problem for people less familiar with programming, but for me it was frustrating that my tools were unintuitive to use.
More objectively though, the levels don't have a lot of freedom in how they are solved. It was rather rare that my first solution wasn't close to the optimal one (aside from wire length, but that's also a stupid metric to judge solutions by, given how limited your control over it is). This was also made worse by the varying difficulty of the puzzles. Tutorial levels barely taught you anything beyond the obvious, and the next level was already on par with some of the most difficult levels I've encountered in Zachtronics games. And like I said before, there was rarely an option for a simpler solution that did worse on the leaderboards. You either solved it, or you didn't.

Overall, I don't see a lot of reason to recommend it over any Zachtronics puzzle game, especially now that he came out of his brief retirement with yet another game. It's a tough bar to beat, but there are hundreds of hours of Zachtronics games to play, and while The Signal State is far from the worst logic puzzle game I've played, it's too close to the frustration of studying, and too far from the fun of learning.