Games Like BitWise

Close the loop, and the lamp lights.

That is the first level. By the seventh chapter a machine you wired listens to a blinking beacon, tells the dots from the dashes, and lights the lamp marked A.

BitWise is a puzzle game about electricity and the machines people made from it. You place parts on a bench, wire them by hand, and the circuit runs on a real simulator. The grader has no answer key. If the lamp lights, current reached it.

Build it once, then build with it

Wire an XOR out of NAND gates and it is sealed as a chip in your tray. Add one AND and the half adder is sealed too. Cross two gates and you have a latch. Discipline the latch with a clock and you have a flip-flop. Line up flip-flops and you have a counter. Every part you build this way is sealed by your hand and carried forward, until the tray holds an ALU and a program ROM and a bench asks for a machine that follows orders and halts itself.

Seven chapters, one engine

The campaign map is the Iron Heart, the engine the whole workshop turns on. Each chapter is one of its subsystems. The map is a machine too, and in the third chapter you build it yourself.

Live current on every wire

Analog benches run on the same nodal analysis SPICE uses. Digital parts settle every tick. Touch any part and the Inspector's Probe reads its live voltage. Put a trace on the Oscillograph and watch a counter tick, or a relay chatter alternating current out of two batteries. The grader watches what the circuit does. A strange build that does the job passes, and a bench that is teaching the relay will not take a lamp lit around it.

One idea per level

Each new idea gets a level of its own before the next one leans on it. Predict the output before you test it, if you like. Hints climb three rungs, from a nudge to the whole build, and you decide how far up to go. The Almanac keeps a concept map, a toolkit of every part you have sealed, and a codex of where it all came from: Shannon's thesis, the telegraph stations that earthed their return wire, the SRAM cell.

Players of Shenzhen I/O, Turing Complete, and Human Resource Machine will know the shape of this. Here the thing you build is a circuit, and it runs. Anyone who has only ever wondered how a computer works can start with the lamp.

At launch

The game makes no network calls of its own. Everything you make is saved on your disk, and your campaign progress, settings, Wireless Room progress, My Circuits saves, My Chips and level editor draft are also kept in Steam Cloud.

Accessibility

Every level plays with the mouse alone. Settings has a colour-blind assist (a colour-blind-safe wire palette and a 1/0 readout on outputs), a reduce-motion setting, and separate master and music volume. On the campaign's Morse levels every signal is also shown as light, so they play without sound; one optional drill, Lights Out, is copied by ear alone. The Telegraph's sending levels ask for timed key presses.