Given the fact that professionally I’ve been a programmer my entire career, I’ve always been very interested in any sort of game that adopts programming logic and patterns into it. I’ve seen some where it has been much more obvious that this was a design goal, as well as those that it felt like it was included in spirit, even if not so directly. The challenge is always in finding a way to help people understand and execute these concepts in a way that’s both instructive and fun, and I can appreciate the fact that doing that effectively would be quite a challenge.

In Neon Noodles you have a game that feels like 2 concepts I’ve seen handled separately, mashed together. On the one side you have factory automation games that are geared towards setting up different stations that produce, modify, move, or otherwise complete some product from start to finish. In the more extreme games out there in the genre, these can get quite elaborate for large-scale production, but you typically will start out small. On the other side, you have programming games that can take quite a number of forms, ranging from building pseudo code in some fashion, to using objects or interactions in some way to create patterns that can be repeated. This feels like it’s somewhere in the middle, with some mechanized elements available to you, but then robots that can get involved and work more in the direction of programming, in this case by recording a series of actions you define manually and then looping over them.

In principle this could be workable, but in execution there are absolutely some serious issues. The first is simply that the controls are cumbersome and not terribly intuitive, slowing the player down and possibly frustrating them by not finding ways to better streamline everything. The second is that how the robots operate when you’re programming them, and the variable number of times you need to poke at any given station with any given material, is inconsistent and needlessly aggravating. To perform action X with Y you’ll need to go twice, but if it is X with Z it’s three times, and so on. The time I wasted thinking I’d gotten to understand the weird logic behind things, just to then see the robot loop over and things repeatedly not work properly was ridiculous. Consistency or some clear logic would have been great, but alas there was none that I could see.

The result is a game that could perhaps scratch an itch for someone looking for a game that feels more technical, but does things its own way. That said, while there aren’t many games that mix these two styles together, there are absolutely much better examples of ones that do one or the other far more effectively than this. In its current state, this simply doesn’t feel like a game that has had adequate testing or feedback, given on how to make it more sensible and enjoyable. It feels more like it has been released as-is, buyer beware