Somehow I loved U.P. but watching this reminds me of old text-based adventures with contrived arbitrary obstacles which would only be funny if you didn't spend many hours getting by them. Or a detective novel with an obscure unguessable resolution.

It's like training the three laws of robotics into something that communicates in literally and doesn't have any sense to be cooperative. But every now and then will let you know how it's being uncooperative by saying "btw, humanity's dead again." I guess I don't like hard puzzles that are hard for their own sake.

Universal Paperclips had more plot than this though.

I came here to comment the same thing. And just in case other HN users are not aware of it, here is the link for U.P. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Thank me later for the productivity sinkhole and all the wasted time ;-)

Eh, you sort of had agency with that game. At least in the sense that it is possible you could screw up and it would take a long, long time to get over that. Buying too much of resource A, when you should have saved up money for resource B, that sort of thing.