There is a whole class of visual term rewriting programming languages, usually targeted at children. I think KidSim https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/176789.176795 was the first of them. PuzzleScript is awesome and definitely in the same category. One of the interesting things about TileCode is that it works on a Gameboy like device with minimal inputs and no mouse or keyboard.

Thank you for the pointer! My bad that I didn't thoroughly read the related work section (which does mention KidSim). I think I was also misled because the "when" section of the rule is based on the pattern, but its "do" section is not the output pattern but the instruction list for each actor matched in the pattern. In the other words it can potentially do much more than pattern rewriting (note that PuzzleScript also extends on this, so it is evident that this mechanism has a strong limitation).

Not clear about the mechanics on reading the site, but it reminded me of AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning (https://agentsheets.com/). It was 2d before "graduating" to "agent cubes".

Thanks very much for the pointer to PuzzleScript. I was not aware of it. It's very cool to see a rewriting-based system in practice. I chose to work with a more imperative style of guarded commands in TileCode, but it's very close to a rewriting system.