Little Kitty, Big City
Little Kitty, Big City
Game
Game2022
Bots Are Stupid
Developer Leander Edler-Golla
An ultra-precise 2D platformer where you give robots instructions instead of directly controlling them. Master the campaign levels or create and share your own. “It’s Mario Maker with coding” - Lewis Brindley, Yogscast. From the Steam store page
149 reactions from 2 sources (Steam reviews, Bluesky) · newest Oct 4, 2026 · last updated Oct 8, 2026 · How this works
Audience score
72
Fresh
106 positive · 41 negative
95% range 64–79%
| Source | + | − | = |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam reviews | 106 | 41 | 0 |
| Bluesky * | 0 | 0 | 0 |
* shown, not counted in the score (label accuracy below our 85% bar or not yet audited).
2 newer reactions are still waiting for a label.
Steam's own rating
Mostly Positive
180 of 235 reviews positive (all languages, per Valve)
What people are saying
Summary pending — the reactions are listed below.
Reactions
60 of 149 · most liked firstI hate programming... I hate programming... I hate programming... Oh it works! I LOVE PROGRAMMING!
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The game has its positive sides. The UI is good, the art pack is great, and the audio fits in nicely. While there are bug reports, I encountered none in the time I played the game. The coding language used in this game is simple and easy to learn, but not particularly powerful. Fine-tuning the code is a nice experience if you like fine-tuning and experimenting with timings. You can skip to a specific line in your code (plays all instructions until that line really fast) and then pause the…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I am willing to revisit this game sometime in the future if drastic changes are made but as it stands, I cannot recommend this game. I love platformers and I'm a software developer so I was immediately interested in a game that allows you to script your way through levels. Unfortunately, the reality of this game does not match up to the fantasy. The code you write is very bare bones and basic - there's no logic involved like "if encounter enemy, jump on head. If encounter pit, jump over" etc.…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is not a programming game, this is a trial and error game
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I don't normally write reviews, but I felt compelled to correct some of the other reviews I'm seeing. First off, this game never claims to be a "programming game". The closest that it gets is referencing its "simple programming language", which it provides. The Steam tags are user supplied. Second, it IS a programming game. Sure, it's not your typical programming game that focuses on writing robust solutions to problems or optimizing number of instructions. If that's what you're wanting,…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Amazing precision platformer meets programming game where your brain is much more important than your reflexes. Has a really cool grappling hook mechanic which opens up more creative ways of completing levels than might be obvious first try. The coding is really simple and has a very solid autocomplete to help remember the syntax for beginners. The game also has a level editor a la Mario Maker Series and Levelhead, and in both the base game levels as well as the custom levels it is possible…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I really wanted to like this game. The art is awesome. The music is catchy. The principle is catchy. I've taught programming. The programming aspect is off. Some people complain about the lack of sensors or the lack of commands. I don't take issue with those. I also don't take issue that there is a timing aspect. I take issue that logic takes a back seat to tweaking - not tweaking in an actual code optimization way - but in a trial and error intuit the exact answer that the designer expects
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I agreed so much with another review that I will just copy paste it here. "This is not a programming game, this is a trial and error game"
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →10% logic, 90% finding the right frame/timing number :( Code like "wait until grounded" is rarely useful. Some user-moveable object combined with "wait until Bot_touches_marker" code would be nice move from numbers to visuals. Loops are in the game, just not in the early levels.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →AWESOME! At my government job, they use the word BOTS way too much. The title of this game drew me in, and the game play is so much fun. Very awesome, somewhat challenging, casual programming game. Cute pixel graphics. And so far, the developer seems to be pretty responsive to my bug reports. (TIP FOR DEV, bug report box should allow for special characters and use a multi-line text box for more detailed bug reports, also making the bug report box accessible in the level pause menu would be a…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game advertises itself as a "coding" and "logic" scrypting game that is supposed to make you practice problem solving in a rather simple environment. Instead what I've been doing while playing is painstakingly change float values in the "wait" function by like 0.001 to perfectly time my bot jumping or hooking through a small gap. Gameplay like this doesn't bring me any value and doesn't make me feel like I've accomplished or learned anything by beating a level.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →More of a neat idea than a fun game. There's not even a lot of opportunity here to learn anything.. Is there code/scripting? Sure. Is it programming? No. So, what is it? A tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) game where you use code to see how quickly you can complete objectives in various maps/scenarios. If you are unfamiliar with what that means, its where precise inputs/actions are plotted throughout the course of a map/scenario where you can theoretically perfect the playthrough to the…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is less a game about programming and more one about TASing. If you've ever heard of a speed run where people can do crazy tricks, TASing takes that to a new level where your movements can be timed down to the number of frames something is pressed for. Put that into a game where each iteration of a run changes based on the commands you put in, gives you tools to measure amount of time or distance or angle things happen at, and you have Bots are Stupid. Add user created levels and kaizo…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This isn't a programming game. It's a waiting game. Figuring out the solution to a level is easy. Figuring out the exact duration of time to wait before executing your next Jump is also easy -- but tedious. Just keep subtracting or adding. You're going to spend most of your time watching your robot complete the same "solved" part of the puzzle again and again as you trial-and-error the timing until the next command. It's a precision game without dexterity. There is a specific person that will…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Good idea for game, graphics and UI is perfect, but game is boring. About 10% of the game is figuring how to reach goal and writing program using simple commands like: move, jump, hook, unhook etc. and putting wait between them to add delay. Rest 90% of the game is trying to tune up wait length. I survived about 20 minutes and had enough.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →There's nothing clever about the game, it's just trial and error. The only thing the game challenges is your willingness to go through the tedium of fine-tuning your command timings. Turns out, text command inputs don't make for very fun platforming.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →TLDR: Unfortunately not for me. This isn’t a “real” programming game and lacks some very important coding concepts that would make platforming much more enjoyable to think through. PROS: +Creative use of the platforming genre. CONS: -Lacks object oriented programming concepts – Needs IF statements and loops. -Messes up my HDR every time when I’m done playing. I need to manually turn it off and on. Gameplay (Controls/Mechanics/Loop/Difficulty) – [6/10] The core gameplay loop consists…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Not that far into this, but I'm really enjoying it so far! It kinda feels like Lemmings meets 7 Billion Humans. The amount of available commands is good - there is enough for variety, and not so many to overwhelm you, and the ability to play frame by frame is great for breaking down exactly where you went wrong, as well as trying to trim milliseconds off your time. The levels ramp up well in complexity, and feel different enough, and the ability to make your own and play other players' (a la…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →wait 0.1 too fast wait 0.4 too slow wait 0.2 too fast wait 0.3 too slow wait 0.25 ah, not what I was going for, but it works!
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I like the concept of the game however, the game is so inflexible with it's objective's it doesn't allow itself to be a game, you aren't allowed to complete levels by making silly mistakes, no mistake is acceptable, and that makes the game quite boring, like a fetch quest.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This 💩stinkerado💩 unfortunately didn't do it for me. Who is this game for: People with no clue about programming might like this. As a simple, bare-bones introduction to programming, in the sense that "a program is just a set of instructions", this might be of some limited use. But so is a cookbook. It explains the same principle. 🤣 If you know how to write code, this game sucks horribly. Why? - There are no conditionals. - There are no loops (well, there is "wait until", if that counts)…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →TL;DR: Interesting concept but it gets old far too fast for what it could be, and the advertisement is misleading enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. Despite all the talk that "It's Mario Maker with coding", this is a TAS-ing game thorugh and through. There is no logic puzzle to solve, it's all a question of finding perfect values to wait for. And more importantly, there is nothing there that could make it a real programming game, there are no real inputs and everything is deterministic.…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's very good at what it is: a 2d precision platformer designed for Tool Assisted Speedruns (TASes), instructions are intuitive compared to most TASing (where you need to write what buttons are being pressed, joystick angles, etc, and how many frames you're doing that for, or perhaps each frame if the tools aren't very developed), which I think is great for beginners. If one expects this to be a programming game, where you're solving programming (software engineering) problems... It may very…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Very cool concept and I love the art. It just gets a bit old after a few levels, especially getting the timing right on the wait command. It just ended up becoming a cycle of running the script, it not working and changing the timing by .1 seconds
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game isn't as much about programming, it's more about making a TAS (obviously simplified). Easy to understand, hard to master. The game isn't that long (yes my >150 hours is extremely excessive), but you can easily get lost in trying to squeeze the best optimization possible. It's very good at what it is, 2D TAS platformer, but do note that it can be somewhat repetitive doing a lot tweaking. That said, I haven't played anything like this before and it's quite fun to spend hours…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →fantastic wee game! great introduction to programming, great problem solving practice. great fun.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A pretty buggy game, it is more of a fine tuning simulator than a programming simulator, I personally do enjoy it but the bugs make it really annoying I would not recommend this for full price but I would recommend to try it out if its around $3 or less, its nothing special but there is still fun to be had as long as you're the right target audience. The reasons im not recommending the game is due to the bugs, price and most importantly its not getting any updates so I dont expect this game…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Stability and frequent bugs issues aside, most of the gameplay feels tedious and repetitive. It's also a bit disappointing that most of the important mechanics aren't explained well, especially the tickrate and stop commands, which makes for frustrating gameplay where you just tweak numbers until it works. As another reviewer mentioned, this also teaches bad programming skills. Finally, the editor is very glitchy, and the cursor and highlighted text always selects incorrectly multiple times a…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Gamification of coding, especially when it appears as slick as this, is great for kids. ...but a game about coding that seems to have the worst optimisation possible for a 2D game? Come on. While my daughter has only played the first six levels, the trial-and-repeat nature of re-running an entire sequence due to inching a WAIT command back or forward by a tenth or hundredth of a second...sucks the fun out of it. It somewhat appeals to an older coder like me - almost entering optimisation…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →was hoping the coding would be more complicated. im just telling the bot excactly what to do and i have yet to encounter the need to use any wait command other than "wait "
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →You basically write simple commands to program a little bot through obstacle courses. The puzzle logic is neat at first, but tweaking your code quickly turns into a frustrating trial-and-error mess. It gets old fast.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Yes, they are. You have to code the bots to travel through the level, but its mostly trial and error due how basic some instructions are. The direction you walk, the jump timing, the wait periods, grappling hook direction. Its a bit interesting at first, but soon enough you find out that this whole thing stinks. The tutorial bot tries to use the same mechanics to animate itself before the level, and on 3 out of 5 levels I had played, the bot couldn't jump to the right spot or stop in time and…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I do NOT actually recommended but I cannot bring myself to give a small indie game a negative review for being exactly what it claims. This game really is an "ultra-precise 2D platformer where you give robots instructions". I thought the game focus would be on figuring out what instructions to give the bots. Instead, the instructions are pretty obvious and the focus of the game is on the "ultra-precise" part. I spent most of my time adjusting delay timings and I did not find that fun.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is a really cool idea for a game I thought, and I actually bought and played it fairly quickly after discovering it, which is kind of rare for me. It's definitely not for everyone, but if you like programming at all and like the idea of TAS (relating to speedruns, "Tool Assisted Speedrun"), then this might be interesting to you. I had lots of fun playing it. Much of the game was done really well, like the online content (minus the negatives listed near the end of the review), the…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Interesting idea, and I would have liked to like it, but the bots behavior doesn't follow some very intuitive rules of pendulums and gravity, so I just felt like all the puzzles were basically hundreds of incremental trials and error... mostly error.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →56 lines of code for 7.21 seconds, totally worth it
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I was expecting more of a programming game based on reviews, whereas this is really more of a speedrunning bot microtuning game - the difference being there's not really much in the way of conditions, and you're not ever programming the bot to react to varying circumstances, it's 100% "do exactly this sequence to complete this level", which for me is a bit less interesting. But there's still a decent amount of fun to be had trying to optimize for speed or optimize for program shortness or just…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →are the bots stupid or am i stupid?
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game tries to be a unique turtle scripting game, but it feels extremely basic and limited when you realize it's much better to just bump wait timers by 0.1 until you complete the puzzle. There are some good conditional concepts like wait until / while / while not, but a movement platformer is just not a good medium for them, especially when this game encourages you to micromanage for speed or achievements. You will really only use THREE commands to make arbitrary guesses as to what wait…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's a shame that so many of the other reviews are deriding this game for not being a true programming game. I mean... The language isn't even Turing complete. *gasp* But it's fine that it's not. What it is instead is a tool-assisted speedrunning game. Beating each level in and of itself might not be too hard if you're use to Zachtronics games but pushing the grappling hook to it's limit and discovering exactly how to use and exploit its mechanics to go as fast as possible is a really fun…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Essentially TAS simulator. All the fun lies in trying to figure out how to break the game's physics and reduce your times as much as possible. Unfortunately for me, it turned out to be too difficult of an exercise, and I mostly just stuck to playing it as a platformer where you input all the commands at the start of the level, which bored me pretty quickly...
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Bots Are Stupid is a short but surprisingly challenging puzzle platformer where you guide little bots through deadly obstacle courses by giving them simple commands. The twist is that the bots follow your instructions exactly as given – even if that leads them straight into danger. The minimalist artstyle is clean and functional, keeping the focus on the puzzles themselves. The atmosphere is lighthearted, but the gameplay can get quite tricky, especially in later levels where timing and precise…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →TAS simulator. You type a script which moves your character in an exact, replicable fashion. Your goal is to input a sequence of commands that gets your character to the exit. As fat as possible, preferably. All quality of life features are included. Leaderboards with fastest completions were insane to watch. It's an extremely niche game, this is neither traditional speedrunning (you don't control the character directly) nor it's going to make you a programmer (I guess it didn't mean to). But…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This "gamified TAS" is a cool idea and I had a lot of fun playing, despite not knowing (or caring) anything about TAS. I didn't get into any optimization, but watching your umpteenth little dude finally nail all those hook shots is quite satisfying (yeh, and also watching his predecessors faceplant the spikes...)
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I absolutely love the idea and concept of this game. It's basically TASing (Tool-assisted speedruns) the game. I've always wanted to dabble with it but never follow through cause you need a lot of tools to hack the internals of the game to show velocity, time, hitbox, etc., etc. This game has implemented all of that and has made everything seamless, even providing a slo-mo frame-by-frame playback. All it asks the player is to make a sequence of inputs to guide your character to the finish…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I would recommend this game to any person involved in the game logic development in whatever way. It shows the basic principles of AI logic execution without causing excessive cognitive overload, but what is most important, it puts a giant smile on your face with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishing a task.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Definitely has a lot of trial and error that becomes boring very quickly. Some people might enjoy this, though.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Bots Are Stupid is a hybrid 2D retro pixel platformer and programming sim... instead of directly controlling your character you enter programming commands and then hit play to go through the level and see if you make it or not. Not a terrible idea for a niche game, but the delivery is where this one dies, and it dies hard. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Edited in 2023.12.28. warning：i have to say it is just a trial and error game,if your main goal is just completing the levels. But if you play this game with certain ADDITIONAL goals, like finishing the level with less lines or less time, your gaming experience will be much better(and harder :) Speedrunning or making better scripts in this game is really cool,and the leaderboard can be a good reference. (no plagiarism plz hope you enjoy the trials hehehehehehe
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is a game made for people who love to fine tune a system to perfection. I know there aren't many of those people out there but if you are one, oh boy ... You will be glued to the screen perfecting your instructions by fractions of a second to shave just a little bit off of your record. Going outside is overrated anyway. :)
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →pretty fun. It's not a puzzle game like the zachtronics games and you'll find yourself using a lot of the same techniques to get through the later levels. the game could use more tools and commands, would let me be more creative with each level instead of "figure out how to get as much speed as possible and then bounce around like a pinball."
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is gonna go into the halls as one of the greats. Top soundtrack, top design, top game, props to the devs. if u want to get into coding try out this little gem to understand the basics! Simple yet complex
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Great little game to just have a chill time with. Bonus points for the achievements of the game actually being fun challenges themselves!
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I'm not too far into the game yet, but after finding my footing in the first couple levels of introduction, I've had a blast iterating on my programs to sling my little bot around each corner as quickly as possible to shave time off the clock and climb the rankings for each level. You can of course just write a program that completes the level and then move on, but I couldn't help myself spending time optimizing each corner in a level, finding the perfect hook spot, getting the exit timing just…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Day 21 of #GameSuggestions ! Bots are Stupid is a programming game about helping bots go through various obstacle courses for reaching the goal! Fun game, even if I suck at it. #BotsareStupid #ProgrammingGame #platformer store.steampowered.com/app/1578160/...
unlabelledView post →Nice game. It could be a way to introduce some people to programming, even adults I guess. Maybe not for everyone, but still you may give it a try with the demo.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →this game is amazing, its so simple and easy t understand but perfecting your runs is so satisfying when you either accidentally make something work or you get something just right and it works perfectly. 11/10 would kill another silly bot
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Just one less line.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This was oddly compelling and had a lot of levels.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Can't wait to see this TAS'd at GDQ
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →
Posts are quoted from public profiles with links to the original. Want yours removed? Contact us.
You Might Also Like
similar titlesWhat Remains of Edith Finch
What Remains of Edith Finch
Game
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
Game
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate
Game
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Game
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Game