I played and loved both World of Goo and Little Inferno. Human Resource Machine does not live up to their legacy - it has significantly less depth of story and gameplay.

HRM's story is just a linear sequence of predictable events. I'm going to ruin it for you: Something is wrong, robots are coming, robots have come, robots have taken over, you've been obsoleted by the invention of the computer.. That's it. Maybe you get another cutscene if you 100% all bonus objectives, but how inane the story is so far, I doubt it'd be worth it. (EDIT: With help from the forums, I 100%'d all levels and got all achievements - didn't unlock or change anything)

The gameplay revolves around programming a very simple computer - it gets some inputs, your program runs, and it emits some outputs. The inputs are numbers and letters. In a few levels, the letters actually spell something! Yeah, it's usually not very exciting. The problem is that the primary source of difficulty is how bad the programming interface is - you drag and drop instructions in a list. You can only see about 15 instructions on the screen at once, and you'll often end up with a big mess of overlapping arrows.

Finding solutions is easy, but inputting them into the computer is tedious. You're basically spending most of your time as the compiler, not the programmer. There are only about 5 levels that are actually difficult to find the solution to. The game is only 42 levels, of which roughly 20 are trivially easy tutorials, 17 are frustrating but not hard, and 5 are actually challenging.

The ending came very suddenly and left me thinking "WTF did I just pay for? That was barely a game at all!". I get that World of Goo took many years to build and Tomorrow Corporation are probably trying to make smaller/cheaper games faster, but HRM isn't a good small game - it feels like they took the design for a big game and cut it in half, leaving something that feels very incomplete.

I played and loved both World of Goo and Little Inferno. Human Resource Machine does not live up to their legacy - it has significantly less depth of story and gameplay. HRM's story is just a linear sequence of predictable events. I'm going to ruin it for you: [spoiler]Something is wrong, robots are coming, robots have come, robots have taken over, you've been obsoleted by the invention of the computer.[/spoiler]. That's it. Maybe you get another cutscene if you 100% all bonus objectives, but how inane the story is so far, I doubt it'd be worth it. (EDIT: With help from the forums, I 100%'d all levels and got all achievements - didn't unlock or change anything) The gameplay revolves around programming a very simple computer - it gets some inputs, your program runs, and it emits some outputs. The inputs are numbers and letters. In a few levels, the letters actually spell something! Yeah, it's usually not very exciting. The problem is that the primary source of difficulty is how bad the programming interface is - you drag and drop instructions in a list. You can only see about 15 instructions on the screen at once, and you'll often end up with a big mess of overlapping arrows. Finding solutions is easy, but inputting them into the computer is tedious. You're basically spending most of your time as the compiler, not the programmer. There are only about 5 levels that are actually difficult to find the solution to. The game is only 42 levels, of which roughly 20 are trivially easy tutorials, 17 are frustrating but not hard, and 5 are actually challenging. The ending came very suddenly and left me thinking "WTF did I just pay for? That was barely a game at all!". I get that World of Goo took many years to build and Tomorrow Corporation are probably trying to make smaller/cheaper games faster, but HRM isn't a good small game - it feels like they took the design for a big game and cut it in half, leaving something that feels very incomplete.