>Shenzhen is teaching you to actually program – badly.
It’s following the idea of assembly on highly constricted systems to a tee. I’m surprised you ignore that this type of problem solving is deeply fascinating to programmers. Machine code writers of the 50s/60s were known to let opcodes double as program constants, which is a terrible idea nobody would do today, but one can’t help appreciating the manic cleverness of this.

¥4 COST 285 POWER 7 LINES
teq x0 100
+ mov p0 acc
+ mul 4
+ sub 150
+ mov acc p1
- mov p0 p1
slp 1

vs
“Trying to somehow sample the signal (p0) to a register at first stage”
¥4 COST 310 POWER 6 LINES
tcp x0 p0
mov p0 acc
+ mul 4
+ sub 150
mov acc p1
slp 1

Constraining the player is a way to tell them “hey, the intended solutions all need no more than two controllers. Don’t get started with the third, the obvious approach doesn’t work here”. And it also means you run out of space quickly, so you don’t feel like you’ve wasted too much time pursuing the wrong solution (which, coincidentally, is why I’ve all but shelved SpaceChem – I loved the idea and the first few puzzles, but then it quickly became infuriating as you realized reactor number 4 has no physical way to do what you want because you’ve shipped the molecule from reactor 1 a square too far to the left, and it’s all the way back to the beginning with you).

Agreed on the learning curve being a wall you’ll smash your head against, but at least it’s somewhat softened if you’ve played SpaceChem and TIS-100. It’s an odd decision to make this kind of sequel-but-not-really, though – it basically ensures you won’t drag many new people in, which kinda doesn’t match Shenzhen being aesthetically far more polished. As a programmer, I appreciate not being hand-held over what the register is, but I can see how it would be offputting.

I kind of like the datasheets. You’re supposed to print them, tab dividers and all, so that you have a physical tchotchke – but I found that a second monitor works just as well. For better or for worse, they’re pretty realistic (including, especially, the bad ones, the useless ones, and the one in Chinese. Terrible documentation isn’t just a problem with coding), and they add to the immersion.

And I think that a lot of the issues you have with Shenzhen stem from the way you approach it – as a coding challenge rather than a constrained puzzler. Because under the facade of assembly and coding, that’s what it is – the goal is to find the single solution that satisfies the requirements, figuring out the tricks behind the level to find out what the creator had in mind when designing it. It’s not good coding practice, but to me, it would be much more difficult for Shenzhen to provide an appropriate amount of challenge/frustration balance if it was the other way around.

I can understand just hard games. When I play RPG game I usually do it on highest difficulty setting cause I know this is where you need to use all game systems, otherwise you can most of them. I understand games that punish you for mistakes like Dark Souls which sends you back, or really most modern shooters without quick save requiring you to replay encounters from the beginning. If I ever play Fallout 4 again it will be cause of Survival mode which is supposedly where game is not a power fantasy. Outside of videogames I enjoy quizzes and have sort of reputation in that trade.

But those games… I am too a programmer by trade. Sometimes I even program in my free time. True, learning new development environment like a language or framework is even harder than those games – in the game you have at least some sort of tutorial, learning curve and feedback on your mistakes while new framework can just throw Unexpected Param AlQBidder$49 when you try to compile an example from documentation because you haven’t adjusted timezone in some property file. Still after this initial challenge you get creativity, tasks that make sense, technical problems becoming minimal and tool truly becoming the tool, not the challenge. Games like that concentrate on the least fun thing about programming – frustration because of not understanding how the tools work – without giving you real world benefits of learning the tool.

I don’t play Korean MMOs too, but as I understand they give you a feeling of progression by doing routine tasks and filling progress bars for all sorts of things. In a sense it’s a total opposite of those kinds of game but they look to me as more fair… Hobby, if you wish. You spend time with it, you relax, you switch your brain to a menial task with steady flow of gratification. Perhaps those kinds of brain intensive games like Chemspace are good when your day job *is* about menial tasks?..