Hands down the single worst game I've ever played. Unrealistic and stupidly difficult for NO reason. They arbitrarily remove the shit you need from every level just to make it pointlessly difficult. This isn't a game, it's an anxiety attack. I have never once raged at any game I've ever played, I just quit, but I broke shit playing this horrid pile of shit. I simply cannot overstate how BAD this game is.
I said this in a review I left, but I had the same kind of frustration as Mollyarty and I think it was a matter of expectations. Like, when I encounter a programming game, I expect a problem-solving game - a series of tasks to be tackled with whatever resources are available - and Silicon Zeroes simply is not a problem-solving game. You don't want us to invent solutions, you want us to find whatever solutions you already came up with.
In a problem-solving game, mechanics exist to give the players more tools with which to achieve their goals. In a puzzle game, mechanics exist to give you more tools with which to design obstacles. Approaching this as a problem solving game, then, I feel jerked around, because (to reference the puzzle I quit the game over) the company already has subtract-chips and input-select chips and there's no reason for me not to use those. I can do what this egregious asshole of a fictional character is asking me to do, but you just won't let me - and that makes me feel jerked around by you, not just the character you want me to hate.
In a puzzle game, these design choices are fine. And if I knew this was a puzzle game, I wouldn't have minded because I wouldn't have played it. But I didn't know it was a puzzle game, so when it created meaningless challenges with no in-universe justification, I hated it.
I don't know if this is a helpful comment to you, but reading your reply to Mollyarty, I felt like you were missing a point, so I wanted to highlight it.
Oh, I definitely know it made a lot of people unhappy! It's the #1 complaint people made about the game, and if I'd known that coming in, I would have done things differently - put more work into the plot to justify it, rearranged the levels to keep parts being introduced more consistently, just had more superfluous parts included in levels...
It's something I've taken into account in my next game (Manufactoria 2022), for sure. I do want people to enjoy my games! This frustration just wasn't something I ever anticipated or saw in playtesters.