Another Zachtronics game beaten, and i must admit Shenzhen I/O is the hardest one i've played (so far). I needed a guide for the last few puzzles, and i will forever hang my head in shame

It started about halfway through, when i just needed a guide for the circuit designs, which i found i was overcomplicating. Once i had that, i could write the code to finish the puzzle. However, this slowly morphed into not knowing how to code the solution anymore, or more specifically, i struggled with creating a solution that fit into fourteen (14!) lines of code. There's an interesting language twist with the test conditions, followed by the + - statements, that do well to reduce the lines of code (at the cost of mental load, at least for me), but it often wasn't enough. And if a component needed more lines than available, you need to add another component, which means you need even more code lines to manage the info passing between them, and so my solutions easily cascaded into an overcomplicated nightmare

To be fair to Shenzhen's difficulty though, i haven't completed all the puzzles in Infinifactory and TIS-100, so maybe they become as hard as this, but it didn't seem that way from what i have seen. SpaceChem was pretty hard, and i'm sure i used a guide at the end (so long ago), but Opus Magnum and Molek-Syntez were definitely not like this - and i enjoyed them more for it